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

The loss of faith in absolute reason brings with it a loss of faith in the meaning of history, the world, humanity, and human beings themselves. From the very beginnings of the history of philosophy, we see the emergence of a struggle between a naïve faith in reason and skepsis—a form of scepticism that negates or undermines it from an empiricist standpoint. This skepsis presents 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 understand the movement of modern philosophy as a whole—despite all the oppositions within it—from Descartes to the present day ¹.

Husserl observes that the true spiritual struggles of European humanity are fought out between philosophers—between sceptical philosophies (which, though they retain the name, are no longer true philosophies) and real, living philosophies ².

A universal philosophy must be established. 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 become a humanity shaped by philosophical reason, will prove to have been nothing but an illusion, a historically traceable accident, the contingent legacy of a humanity adrift among the many civilisations and histories of humankind. Or whether what was first intuited in Greek civilisation 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 guided the development of philosophical movements: mathematics is assigned universal tasks and given a new mode of expression.

The Ancients had already idealised spatial figures and numbers derived from experience. They transformed principles and demonstrations into ideal, geometrical equivalents. 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 reason—truths that are absolutely unconditioned.

However, antiquity did not conceive of the infinite task implied by the concept of geometric space and by geometry as a science. What we now possess is 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 totality of being, systematically governed by rational science—is an unprecedented novelty ⁷.

As a result, objects are no longer accessible to us merely individually, incompletely, or as if by chance; rather, they are grasped through a systematically unified rational method, which, in an infinite progression, ultimately encompasses 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 only appearances, which we mistake for reality itself. And yet, we do not assume the existence of multiple worlds. We must believe in a single world—a 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