Summary: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (page 3)

The decline in faith in absolute reason leads to a decline in faith in the meaning of history, the world, humanity, and man himself. From the very beginning of the history of philosophy, we see the emergence of a struggle between a naïve faith in reason and skepsis—a scepticism that serves as its empiricist negation or devaluation. This skepsis posits the lived world, the world of actual experience, as one in which reason is absent.

We are now facing the greatest danger: a descent into scepticism. To grasp the present crisis, we must come to an understanding of the movement of modern philosophy in its unity—despite all the oppositions it contains—from Descartes to the present day ¹.

Husserl observes that the authentic spiritual battles of European humanity are waged as battles between philosophers—namely, between sceptical philosophies (which, though they have retained the name, are no longer true philosophies) and real, still living philosophies ².

A universal philosophy must be founded. Indeed, only in this way can we determine whether the Telos—the goal—that arose for European humanity with the birth of Greek philosophy, the aspiration to be a humanity born of philosophical reason, will turn out to have been nothing more than a mere illusion, a historically traceable accident, the contingent inheritance of a contingent humanity lost amid the multiplicity of human civilisations and histories. Or whether what was first intuited in Greek humanity is, rather, that very thing which [...] is essentially included in humanity as such ³.

Husserl describes philosophers as civil servants of humanity ⁴, a humanity striving towards a Telos that it can reach only through philosophy.

He presents The Crisis as a work in the history of philosophy, a historical study that will both reveal the practical possibility of a new philosophy ⁵ and shed light on the tragic failure of modern psychology ⁶.

II. Elucidation of the Origin of the Modern Opposition Between Physicalist Objectivism and Transcendental Subjectivism

From Descartes onwards, a new idea has governed the development of philosophical movements: mathematics is assigned universal tasks and a new mode of expression.

The Ancients had already idealised spatial figures and empirical numbers. They transformed principles and demonstrations into ideal geometrical principles and demonstrations. With Euclidean geometry emerged the idea of a systematically unified deductive theory, based on fundamental axiomatic principles and proceeding by apodictic reasoning.

This deductive theory makes it possible to derive a body of truths from pure rationality—truths that are absolutely unconditioned.

However, antiquity did not conceive of the infinite task associated with the concept of geometric space and with geometry as a science. For us, there exists an infinite systematic theory capable of constructing any figure in space. This is the contribution of modernity:

The conception of such an idea—an infinite rational totality of being, systematically governed by a rational science—is an unprecedented novelty ⁷.

As a result, objects are no longer accessible to our knowledge merely individually, incompletely, or as if by chance; rather, they are grasped through a systematically unified rational method, which, in an infinite progression, ultimately reaches every object. This is the ideal of a science that rationally encompasses everything. Mathematics now extends to the natural sciences, transforming the very idea of philosophy.

Thus, for example, whereas in Platonism nature (or reality) participates in the ideal, with Galileo, nature is the ideal. The world is a mathematical multiplicity. It appears that each of us perceives our own appearances, which hold for us as what truly is. Yet, for all that, we do not assume the existence of multiple worlds. It is necessary for us to believe in one World—the World that comprises the same things for all of us, differing only in their appearances from one observer to another ⁸.

What, then, is the content of this world itself? Galileo claims to have discovered it.

¹ I,6,p.20
² ibid.
³ ibid., p.21
⁴ I,7, p.23
⁵ ibid.p.24
⁶ ibid.
⁷ II, 8, p.26
⁸ II,9, p.28