The Crisis of European Sciences
person
From Dermot Moran (Husserl’s Crisis):
The concept of person is the key concept for Husserl’s thoughts on community, on the process of communalisation, and on the meaning of history. As Husserl proclaims in the Cirsis: ‘A particularly privileged position in the surrounding world is occupied by its persons’ (C 328). From Ideas II on, Husserl frequently speaks about the specifically personal approach adopted by humans, what he calls the ‘personalistic attitude’, according to which subjects recognise each other as subjects interested in reasoning and valuing. Persons relate to each other in complex intentional ways, according to their motivations, sedimented traditions, values, beliefs and desires, and so on. These cannot be accounted for in the natural scientific approach. According to Husserl, moreover, this personal attitude is supported by the underlying sense of a shared, common world in which we act and suffer together: ‘We would not be persons for others if there were not over against us a common surrounding world. The one is constituted together with the other’. (Ideas II, p.387)
Husserl’s characterisation of persons stresses not just the traditionally ascribed characteristics of freedom and rationality, but also their intentionality, self-consciousness, autonomy, emotions, rationality, sense of values, and ability to enter into normative social and moral relations. But most of all he stresses their capacity to weave meanings that are socially recognised. The recognition of and from others is crucial to personhood. Human life is lived in the plural such that even the Cartesian cogito needs to be reframed as a communal ‘we think’, nos cogitamus. (Hua, viii 316) [159]
[…] Husserl will insist, the very idea of objectivity as such, of a common objective world – including, and perhaps most especially, scientific objectivity – is not a given brute fact of experience but a very unique and particular achievement of subjects cooperating together.
on measurement:
see pp.25-28
The geometrical methodology of operatively determining some and finally all ideal shapes, beginning with basic shapes as elementary means of determination, points back to the methodology of determination by surveying and measuring in general, practiced first primitively and then as an art in the prescientific, intuitively given surrounding world. [27]
So it is understandable how, as a consequence of the awakened striving for ‘philosophical’ knowledge, knowledge which determines the ‘true’, the objective being of the world, the empirical art of measuring and its empirically, practically objectivising function, through a change from the practical to the theoretical interest, was idealised and thus turned into the purely geometrical way of thinking. The art of measuring thus becomes the trail-blazer for the ultimately universal geometry and its ‘world’ of pure limit-shapes. [28]
[…] On Galileo – If the empirical and very limited requirements of technical praxis had originally motivated tyhose of pure geometry, so now, conversely, geometry had long since become, as ‘applied’ geometry [see notes on Dee below and elsewhere], a means for technology, a guide in conceiving and carrying out the task of systematically constructing a methodology of measurement for objectively determining shapes in constantly increasing ‘approximation’ to the geometrical ideals, the limit-shapes. [28-9]
It did not enter the mind of a Galileo that it would ever become relevant, indeed of fundamental importance, to geometry, as a branch of universal knowledge of what is (philosophy), to make geometrical self-evidence – the ‘how’ of its origin – into a problem. For us, proceeding beyond Glileo in our historical reflections, it will be of considerable interest to see how a shift of focus became urgent and how the ‘origin’ of knowledge had to become a major problem. [29]
[…]
Thus one lives in the happy certainty of a path leading forth from the near to the distant, from the more or less known into the unknown, as an infallible method of broadening knowledge, through which truly all of the totality of what is will be known as it is ‘in-itself’ – in an infinite progression. To this always belongs another progression: that of approximating what is given sensibly and intuitively in the surrounding life-world to the mathematically ideal, i.e., the perfecting of the always merely approximate ‘subsumptions’ of empirical data under the ideal concepts pertaining to the. This involves the development of a methodology, the refinement of measurements, the growing efficiency of instruments, etc. [Crisis. p.66].
Along with his growing, more and more perfect cognitive power over the universe, man also gains an ever more perfect mastery over his practical surrounding world, one which expands in an unending progression. [c.f. notes on globalisation, eg. on John Dee].
[Also with ref to Dee, this passage from The Origin of Geometry (to be read in this context): ‘The progress of deduction follows formal-logical self evidence; but without the actually developed capacity for reactivating the original activities contained within its fundamental concepts, i.e., without the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of its prescientific material, geometry would be a tradition empty of meaning. […]
Unfortunatly, however, this is our situation, and that of the whole modern age.
The ‘presuppositon’ mentioned above has in fact never been fulfilled. How the living tradition of the meaning-formation of elementary concepts is actually carried on can(not? – check other versions) be seen in elementary gemoetrical instruction and its textbooks; what we actually learn there is how to deal with ready-made concepts and sentences in a rigorously methodical way. Rendering the concepts sensibly intuitable by means of drawn figures is substituted for the actual production of the primal idealities. And the rest is done by success – not the success of actual insight extending beyond the logical method’s own self-evidence, but the practical success of applied geometry, its immense, though not understood, practical usefulness. To this we must add something that will become visible further on in the treatment of historical mathematics, namely, the dangers of a scientific lefe that is completely given over to logical activities. These dangers lie i certain progressive transformations of meaning to which this sort of scientific treatment drives one.
[…]
Naturally, problems of this particular sort immediately awaken the total problem of the universal historicity of the correlative manners of being of humanity and the cultural world and the a priori structure contained in this historicity. [so questions of the law in its most general sense]]
Objectivism v transcendentalism [69]:
objectivism […] moves on the ground of the world which is pregiven […] seeks the ‘objective truth’ of this world, seeks what, in this world, is unconditionally valid for every rational being, what it is in itself.
Transcendentalism, on the other hand, says: the ontic meaning of the pregiven life-world is a subjective structure, it is the achievement of experiencing, prescientific life.
As for the ‘objectively true’ world, the world of science, it is a structure at a higher level, built on prescientific experiencing and thinking, or rather on its accomplishments of validity.
Only a radical inquiry back into subjectivity – and specifically the subjectivity which ultimately brings about all world-validity, with its content and in all its prescientific modes, and into the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of the rational accomplishments – can make objective truth comprehensible and arrive at the ultimate ontic meaning of the world. [69]
[…]
I myself use the word ‘transcendental’ in the broadest sense for the original motif […] which through Descartes confers meaning upon all modern philosophies, the motif which, in all of them, seeks to come to itself, so to speak – seeks to attain the genuine pure form of its task and its systematic development. It is the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge, the motif of the knower’s reflecting upon himself and his knowing life in which all the scientific structures that are valid for him occur purposefully, are stored up as acquisitions, and have become and continue to become freely available. [98]
Working itself out radically, it is the motif of a universal philosophy which is grounded purely in this source and thus ultimately grounded.
This source bears the title I-myself, with all of my actual and possible knowing life and, ultimately, my concrete life in general.
The whole transcendental set of problems circles around the relation of this, my ‘I’ – the ‘ego’ – to what it is at first taken for granted to be – my soul – and, again, around the relation of this ego and my conscious life to the world of which I am conscious and whose true being I know through my own cognitive structures.
[…]
We ourselves shall be drawn into an inner transformation through which we shall come face to face with, to direct experience of, the long-felt but constantly concealed dimension of the ‘transcendental.’ The ground of experience, opened up in its infinity, will then become the fertile soil of a methodical working philosophy, with the self-evidence, furthermore, that all conceivable philosophical and scientific problems of the past are to be posed and decided by starting from this ground. [100]
Being-together
[109]
Obviously this is not true only for me, the individual ego; rather we, in living together, have the world pregiven in this ‘together’, as the world valid as existing for us and to which we, together, belong, the world as world for all, pregiven with this ontic meaning. COnstantly functioning in wakeful life, we also function together, in the manifold ways of considering, together, objects pregiven to us in common, thinking together, valuing, planning, acting together. Here we find also that particular thematic alteration in which the we-subjectivity, somehow constantly functioning, becomes a thematic object, whereby the acts through which it functions also become thematic, though always with a residuum which remains unthematic – remains, so to speak, anonymous – namely, the reflections which are functioning in connection with this theme.
§ 54.
The ego was mentioned as the subjective matter of the highest level of reflection; but in the careful analytic-descriptive procedure, which naturally favours the more detailed inter-connections, it did not receive its full due. For the depths of its functioning being make themselves felt only belatedly. In connection with this, what was lacking was the phenomenon of the change of signification of [the form] ‘I’ – just as I am saying ‘I’ right now – into ‘other I’s’, into ‘all of us’, we who are many ‘I’s’, and among whom I am but one ‘I’. What was lacking, then, was the problem of the constitution of intersubjectivity – this ‘all of us’ – from my point of view, indeed ‘in’ me.
[…]
For the necessity of stopping here and entering into self-reflection makes itself felt most sharply through the question which at last unavoidably arises: who are we, as subjects performing the meaning- and validity’ accomplishments of universal constitution – as those who, in community, constitute the world as a system of poles, as the intentional structure of community life?
Can ‘we’ mean ‘we human beings’, human beings in the natural-objective sense, i.e., as real entities in the world? But are these real entities not themselves ‘phenomena’ and as such themselves object-poles and subject matter for enquiry back into the correlative intentionalities of which they are the poles, through whose function they have, and have attained, their ontic meaning?
Naturally, the question must be answered in the affirmative.
§ 66
Does this ground the dualistic science of man and assign to psychology its original sense, as it almost seems to do, in an unassailable manner […]?
As the correlative abstraction teaches us, man (and everything else that is real in animal form) is, after all, something real having two strata and is given as such in pure experience, purely in the life-world; what is required for the regional science of man, then, is obviously first of all what is sometimes called (by contrast to social psychology) individual psychology.
Human beings, concretely, in the space-time of the world, have their abstractly distinguished souls distributed among bodies, which make up, when we adopt the purely naturalistic consideration of bodies, a universe to be considered in itself as a totality.
The souls themselves are external to one another [only] in virtue of their embodiment; that is, in their own abstract stratum they do not make up a parallel total universe.
Thus psychology can be the science of the general features of individual souls only […].
This individual psychology must, then, be the foundation for a sociology and likewise for a science of objectified spirit (of cultural things).
Do these considerations […] not justify the traditional dualism of body and psychic spirit […]?
[…]
A psychology derived from an abstraction which is parallel [to the physicist’s abstraction], on the basis of an ‘inner perception’ and other types of psychological experience which are parallel to outer perception, must be seriously questioned; indeed, taken in this way, it is impossible in principle.
§ 68
The first thing we must do here is overcome the naivete which makes the conscious life, in and through which the world is what it is for us – as the universe of actual and possible experience – into a real property of man, real in the same sense as his corporeity […]
§ 71
[…]
I from my vantage point and every other from his vantage point has his orientd world, a world which presupposes others who from their respective vantage points have others, who in turn have others; and thus these others are presupposed, through mediations of the intentional complex, as subjects for a common world-apperception […]. In other words, each of us has his life-world, meant as the world for all. Each has it with the sense of a polar unity of subjectively, relatively meant worlds which, in the course of correction, are transformed into mere appearances of the world, the life-world for all, the intentional unity which always persists, whihc in turn is itself a universe of particulars, of things. [225]
This is the world; another world would have no meaning at all for us. And in the epoche it becomes a phenomenon.
What remains, now, is not a multiplicity of separated souls, each reduced to its pure interiority, but rather: just as there is a sole universal nature as a self-enclosed framework of unity, so there is a sole psychic framework, a total framework of all souls, which are united not externally but internally, namely, through the intentional interpenetration which is the communalisation of their lives.
[…] every ego-subject has his horizon of empathy, that of his cosubjects, which can be opened up through direct and indirect commerce with the chain of others, who are all others for one another, for whom there can be still others, etc.
[…] this means at the same time that within the vitally flowing intentionality in which the life of an ego-subject consists, every other ego is already intentionally implied in advance by way of empathy and the empathy-horizon.
Within the universal epoche which actually understands itself, it becomes evident that there is no separation of mutual externality at all for souls in their own essential nature. What is a mutual externality for the natural-mundane attitude of world-life prior to the epoche, because of the localisation of souls in living bodies, is transformed in the epoche into a pure, intentional, mutual internality. [225]
With this the world – the straightforwardly existing world and, within it, existing nature – is transformed into the all-communal phenomenon ‘world’, ‘world for all actual and possible subjects’, none of whom can escape the intentional implication according to which he belongs in advance within the horizon of every other subject.
[…]
what is a mutual externality form the point of view of naive positivity or objectivity is, when seen form the inside, an intentional mutual internality.
§ 72
There is only a transcendental psychology, which is identical with transcendental philosophy. [257]