Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Western Science

During the nineteenth century, numerous thinkers devoted much of their speculative efforts to the quest of building a new world order. The orientation toward an ideal state of affairs achieved through science or by a scientific morality began with the Renaissance; before then it had been, if anything, a sporadic enterprise. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the medieval Christian worldview had dramatically eroded; perhaps the first to adumbrate it was Nicholas of Cusa, credited with the phrase: "The center (of the world) is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." Ever since, philosophers and scientists have tried to formulate a substitute religion, or at least a plausible belief system through which man could again find his own place. Hence the proliferation of "utopias" and "new worlds" for about four centuries. Even the nineteenth century was optimistic about a new religion and a new order of things: Auguste Comte, a representative figure of the age, was convinced that he had built, with positivism, the foundation of an edifice containing scientific laws and a credo consecrating them as eternal truths; he propounded this view in his "Positivist Catechism."

Toward the end of the last century, the utopian assumptions began to change, and new evaluations were made by some unpopular minds, or, some would say, revisionist philosophers. Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche turned away from the totem pole of progress. While three or four centuries of utopian thought had branched out widely in search of a new world, the nineteenth century believed that all energy had to be gathered for the adoration of science, the designated chief instrument for the creation of a perfect state of affairs. Perfect, because the scientists knew now how to measure progress and how to predict its future course.

The few "reactionaries" who lived during the zenith of scientific-utopian optimism lived long enough to see the commencing of its twilight. They spoke a language that few understood; it was practically in code, almost like the "Aesopian" script under today's totalitarian regimes. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wee masters at concealing their real thoughts not because they feared the fashionable dandies of the universities, but because they knew that their meaning would not be grasped. Their style was therefore a kind of poetry because, as two other antiprogressives a century earlier, Vico and Heerder, had suggested, new gods arise and are announced through the imagination of poets. What the poets of the twilight and of coming gods (in Kierkegaard's case, the Christian God) knew was that entire walls were collapsing in the vault less edifice of Western modernity. Nietzsche must have been aware that he was shaking the remaining walls and pillars, although his posterity endlessly debates whether he rejoiced over the crumbling stones or whether he wept. (Both, I venture to say).

Assessing Past Achievements

It was left to others to do what serious scholars in declining times most naturally do: taking inventory of past achievements and measuring the crisis points, with the goal of finding the fatal errors, derailments, the hubris, and false hopes. In the last hundred years or so, those who have taken up this task include: Oswald Spengler, Max Weber, C.E.M. Joad, Arnold Toynbee, C.G. Jung, Ortega y Gasset, E. Voegelin, Aurel Kolnai, Hans Sedlmayr, Rene Guenon. The titles of their oeuvres tell the story of sizing up the past since 1900; terms like "decline," "loss of the center," "waning," "dissenchantiment" (Entzauberung), "crisis," "masses" (meant pejoratively), "the reign of quantity," are the key words. The only point of disagreement is the initial date of the corruption. Some place it in the fourteenth century (William of Ockham's nominalism), others in the nineteenth (democracy), yet others attribute it to a much earlier point de rupture or even to the intrinsic secularization of Western civilization.

To the question: "What went wrong?" the frequent answer is that it was inscribed in the nature of the Western, Greco-Christian project that it would end in modernity, nihilism, desacralization. The Islamologist Henry Corbin is perhaps the most radical exponent of this Muslim view: Christ's incarnation obliged the church to plunge into the vicissitudes of history, with its conflicts and shifts of power, which finally brought the church's own secularization. Today the world is homeless; it is torn by ideologies, all of them intent on remaking history and man. Andre Malraux's less sweeping diagnosis concerns the break-up of God's and man's face in art, the excessive individualization of the psyche (Jung), the spread of democracy (Faguet, Ortega y Gasset), the emphasis on economic man (Karl Polanyi, Louis Dumont), the exhaustion of challenge (toynbee), and the spread of utopianism (aurel Kolnai). The literature of decline is vast and growing, and the epigones of the "fathers" are ever able to uncover new facets. Orwell and Huxley merely put these conclusions in a dramatized but hardly caricatural form. It is debatable if they helped the "cause" by focusing public attention on the behavioral aspects of a tragedy that is human and divine. Kafka went deeper, but he too described the consequences, not the process.

At this point entered the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. The formulator of phenomenology who straddled the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he is perhaps the emblematic philosopher of the contemporary age. Phenomenology has spawned, before and after Husserl's death (1938), a multitude of systems: structuralism existentialism, hermeneutics, and branches of linguistics. At the time when Husserl published his Crisis of European Civilization (1935), henceforth referred to as Krisis, his philosophy was not only mature but could also embrace a vast field stretching from science to politics. Husserl lived to watch the decomposition of modernist postulates and the liquidation of deeply rooted optimism and to evaluate his own contribution to a gigantic failure.

What failure? It may be useful to stop here for a moment to take notice of a hardly known essay entitled "An Evaluation of the Doctrines of March" that novelist Robert Musil, the author of A Man without Qualities, wrote while a student. Let us attentive to the conjunction of these names: Ernst Mach, Robert Musil, and Edmund Husserl. All three were central Europeans of the German-language area, were born in the nineteenth but active in the twentieth century, and were contemporaries of several decisive events that announced the "crumbling of the walls." These included the end of the Hapsburg empire, the First World War, the spreading influence of Nietzsche and Kafka, political cataclysms and, in philosophy, the supposed end of metaphysics, which had been condemned by Kant as the dead-end street of the speculative enterprise. It was an end-of-the-world time, with no silver lining on the dark grey clouds of intellect. The only ones who felt exuberant were perhaps the Catholic thinkers. They were divided into two groups: one that, following Bergson, discovered the antimechanist view and thus the possibility of soul, and another that, following Marx, formulated Catholic socialism, the Kingdom materializing in the civitas terrena.

Science Betrays Its Raison D'Etre

Why was young Musil a pessimist? Why can we read his essay as an introduction to Husserl's Krisis? As suggested above, the fin de siecle saw the celebration of the "end of metaphysics." Musil, who can be placed next to Kafka in terms of insight, felt a malaise while as a student he confronted the theses of Mach, which were built on empirical and positivist postulates such as the substitution of substance by a complex of sensations, and reality by a network of pure meanings and signs. This means that knowledge is unable to discover objective reality; it offers only a representation of verifiable facts and their relationships. Musil's criticism points out that such knowledge, while claiming to be scientific, ignores the values of scientific investigation. If the knower cannot reach the intelligibility of physical reality, then his knowledge remains inadequate. This in turn destroys the alleged ideal of science--to know what is. If there is no metaphysical substratum of knowledge, then knowledge remains objectless, a gratuitous speculation. Further, the notion of subject is thus dissolved, and we are compelled to be satisfied with a theory of knowledge where a nonsubject tries to reach a nonobject. Incidentally, Musil's youthful essay explains why his fictional hero is a "man without qualities." Such a man is the necessary product of the academic philosophy that prevailed in the early century. Debates today in our own universities show that the situation has hardly changed. Whoever claims that our intelligence is true knowledge must face the tired smiles and discreet derision of his peers.

Husserl's philosophy suffers from the ambiguity of a position somewhere on the line of rationalist thinkers from Descartes to Kant, and beyond. In short, the Husserlain knower does not know the object, he knows himself in the process of knowing. Husserl does escape from the empiricist position of Hume and March, but does not get rid of the Kantian heritage that locates knowledge between subject and object. But he refuses to place the knowable in the object, where intelligence goes to find it. We noted, apropos of Musil's essay, that such a speculative attitude pulverizes the subject too, leaving it fragmented and radically dissatisfied. Even if we admit that Husserl's (and the positivists') view can serve scientific investigation with its method, we still remain shortchanged in our legitimate demand to understand the processes and conclusions of science. A kind of red signal goes up in the self's economy, warning us that science has betrayed its raison d'etre, which is not domination over nature but its reassuring comprehension.

In other words, around 1900, philosophy was heading toward the major cultural crisis that Nietzsche had both promoted and warned against. "We killed God" should read "We eliminated the substratum of thinking and life.' This is, of course, where existentialism stepped on the stage, as it had in the case of Pascal versus the Cartesian mechanists or in the case of Kierkegaard versus the Hegelian rationalists.

Husserl's merit was to admit the failure of his transcendental phenomenology, placed within the wider failure of European civilization. By 1935 he understood that the scientific postulates current in his time, and to which he had contributed his share, were destroying the very culture they were supposed to serve. They harmed the cause of cognition by so narrowing the validity of knowledge as to complete it to pass through one single channel, and by regarding as expendable the original richness of Western civilization. There is a moving conclusion to Husserl's life. On his deathbed in March 1938, he uttered the following words, immediately jotted down by his nurse: Sister Jagerschmidt. "… I endeavored to proceed from subject to being. But when we philosophize, we always posit the self, and not the object, a tree or a house." This is both a confession of his speculative impotence and a small light in the darkness.

Science Discards Man Himself

In this context, Krisis sheds light on Husserl's struggle against psychologism; that is, against the assumption that knowledge takes place within the self, the cogito. Psychologism is contrary to the classical speculative tradition, which, according to Pierre Hadot's profound study of Hellenic wisdom, has its roots in "spiritual exercises," Whether by Socrates, the Stoics, or Plotinus, destined to teach us a paideia, a way of living in harmony with human nature and the natural world. Husserl began to adumbrate the classical interpretation of the philosophical enterprise rather late in life, when he became aware, to his horror, of the derailment of civilization. Even then, however, he fell victim to the modern view that equates all cultures through a grand method of unification. This is not what the Greeks had in mind. Their universalism concerned the rare individuals capable of imposing a discipline on themselves; it was not a call to "Eskimos and Chinese" (as Husserl put it) to commune in the transcendental sense propounded by Plato. One of Husserl's chief motives in writing Krisis was his fear that Europe, and more narrowly Germany, was at the point of losing its leadership of the only valid philosophy. If not Europe (today we say "the West"), then who? A cri de Coeur, certainly.

Husserl actually believed in the possible concordance of all rational beings, although he wondered whether rationality was a universal and necessary endowment of man, or an "anthropological accident" that manifested itself at a certain moment in time. This question suggests that toward the end of his life Husserl became aware of the derailment of science as an exclusive regulator of "objectivity," discarding man himself. And when finally science offered to envisage man via the disciplines of the "human sciences," man was quickly reduced to the status of an object. In other words, the central Western quest of Centuries--science--got ever farther away from the truth it was supposed to seek. How, in this case, could one still speak of an "ontological validation," Husserl's idea of universal knowledge? The fact is, the positivistic self becomes skeptical of its own knowledge, since scientific propositions no longer present the investigator with anything resembling life.

The Krisis demonstrates that the great attempt to clarify the world has misfired. If knowledge is, by definition, what meets reality, it must be universal not in terms of a superimposed network of measurements, but in terms of a theologically oriented metaphysics. Otherwise, transcendental speculation risks turning into a transcendental solipsism. The hubris of science that Husserl adumbrated in 1935 consists of the assumption that nature's laws, basically unknown and only arbitrarily posited (Kant), determine life itself. We possess sets of solid formulas, but they have no contact with reality.

The Scientific Worldview

The later Husserl mercilessly reexamines the entire speculative enterprise in search of the ontological substratum long ago abandoned as unscientific. From one reduction to another science ended up by tolerating only relations between phenomena while declaring that the phenomena were incomprehensible per se. Thus comprehension was detached from objects and their relationships and was itself discredited as the locus of a genuine act, the act of intelligence and judgment. Modern cosmology, for example, has broken with astrology, whose grasp of gods, spirits, and forces led to an understanding of how people and events are affected by them. In whatever epoch, consciousness is resolutely geocentric, not Copernican. All ancient and archaic civilizations tied the human order to the cosmic order. Human beings may have occupied an undistinguished place on the ladder of hierarchy, but at least they knew where they stood and their position made sense to them. Modern man knows only arbitrary rules derived from arbitrary laws that he himself formulates--without any assurance that he himself, his formulas, or the objects to which he applies them possess any reality other than what is conventionally established. The mathematicized self turns its back on ordinary psychology and human contact. It no longer believes in the reality of knowledge, although it initiated the cult of man (humanism) in the name of knowledge (science)

This overview of the thesis running through Husserl's Krisis calls attention now, half a century later, to a generally ignored aspect of the contemporary critique of the concept of decadence. As a critique, it goes deeper than the accustomed diagnoses that remain aimed at civilization and culture, politics and the state of morality. In what sense, then, is Husserl's critique deep, original, and decisive?

Others have written about structural modifications of the forms of civilization and pointed out that decadence--as well as growth and maturity--is inscribed in the nature of communities, whether small like a literary movement and a religious sect, or big like an empire and a cultural sphere. While such diagnoses explain many things, they are deficient in one respect: they are heirs to the Greek and pagan worldview, regarding history as a series of cyclical systems--almost self-sufficient, self-contained. The reader learns fascinating details and unexpected causal sequences, but something essential remains veiled for him: the deliberate choices that certain thinkers made following their reinterpretations of fundamental experiences.

This is what Husserl did in Krisis. He realized that Western mankind's title of glory, the scientific worldview, is but one possible way to contemplate the universe, and that it is based on two concepts: the positing of progress and the expression of a mathematical ideal. The two concepts fuse because penetration into the mysteries of the universe with mathematical tools leads to ever more precise measurements, with the ultimate objective of mastery over the universe. To be sure, the mastery becomes firmer every day; yet its parallel is a diminishing comprehension. In other words, the result of the accumulation of scientific knowledge is a loss from sight of reality--the reality that science was supposed to explain in the first place. To return Robert Musil's anxious quest: If science abandons the principle of causality, how can we understand what is real? Or, differently put, can we abandon the postulate of a real substratum that governs all valid knowledge and still speak of "science" leading us to "knowledge?" Did Galileo improve on Plato when he concluded that nature is not a copy of transcendent reality but an expression of mathematical laws? Obviously, "mathematical laws" is at least as far removed from our experience of nature as are the Platonic ideas.

The Ontological Substratum as "Knowledge"

C.E.M. Joad, in a book on "decadence," defines this ever-controversial term as the "loss of the object," demonstrable in modern times through a long sequence of philosophical speculation. John Locke removed as "secondary qualities" whatever was not reducible to mathematical and quantifiable categories; Kant turned qualities into cognitive devices of individual consciousness. Modern art, write Joad (and Ortega y Gasset agrees), has broken up, deformed, and finally abolished objects because they do not stand up under scientific scrutiny--a scrutiny that has by now shaped the sensibility of several generations.

Objects and reality are receding from us like galaxies from one another. The insight of Nicholas of Cusa is fully vindicated: We are disoriented in a disorienting universe because we have put arbitrarily devised rules in the place where structured reality used to be. The infinite used to be "measured" as man's distance from God. For Pascal, on the threshold of modernity, the infinite became frightening, but he had the consolation that the "spaces" too were God's creation, and that among creatures, man was uniquely favored. Today, however, the infinite is understood as solitude facing time that we must endlessly measure.

What is the Husserlian judgment on decadence in our time? What is its unique significance? First, in light of Oswald Spengler's study of comparative civilizations, we possess only technically philosophical reasoning on decadence. In Husserl, we have a professional philosopher who, reconsidering his own impasse, formulated decadence as the modern detachment from the ontological substratum. In short, it is, given Husserl's prestigious place in contemporary speculation, an authoritative reversal of the Kantian antimetaphysical postulates. Paradoxically, it was the positivist Auguste Comte with his frequently profound insights, who called attention to what he called the "critical doctrine" (since Descartes) that was ruining philosophy. Comte asked for the restoration of a "noncritical" doctrine, one that would propose the validation of judgment and join reality on the latter's terms. What Husserl did in Krisis was to admit that a network of sings, no matter how mathematically sophisticated and precise (precise because they were empty, even tautological, based on convention) cannot be a substitute for knowledge. In fact, it erodes knowledge, both in its roots and its function. Life, Husserl wrote, recognizes the meaning of direct sensory perception.

If this is so--and outside of a never-conclusive skepticism, only our derailed scientific enterprise would deny it--then we may expect the beneficial consequence of the restoration of our culture, which has suffered from excessive formalism. Concretely, art, education, literature, and, of course, science have abandoned meaning in a desperate attempt to make ever more abstract and arbitrary geometrical shapes interact with each other, carefully avoiding content as n irrelevant intruder. Ortega y Gasset called it "la deshumanizacion del arte:" in psychology, it is behaviorism; in sociology, the precedence given to the study of structures; in literature, "le nouveau roman," and so forth. Before we study decadence as a historic cataclysm, we should examine its daily observable symptoms in the public and intellectual context. The crisis arises when we abandon the substratum and when arbitrary statements usurp those that knowledge naturally and spontaneously dictates to one of its possible expressions, called science. Husserl's Krisis proposes, in sum, the trusting acceptance of knowledge even in areas that Descartes and his successors would not have been able to comprehend mathematically. There is more to know under the sun than what a civilization, or a philosophical system, is spacious enough to embrace.