Summary: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (page 6)

Galileo abstracts subjects as persons; he abstracts everything that belongs to the mind in any sense. From this abstraction arise purely corporeal things, forming a world ¹.

It is only with Galileo that the idea of nature as a truly separate and self-enclosed world of bodies comes to light ².

The world thus splits into two: nature and the world of psychology.

The Ancients studied bodies but did not posit the existence of a closed world of bodies—the object of a universal science of nature.

They also investigated the human and animal soul, yet they could not conceive of psychology in the modern sense.

This marks a fundamental shift in the meaning of the world.

In Descartes, we find the idea of a universal mathematics. Galileo’s early successes encouraged this transformation. Philosophy, henceforth, had to be constructed more geometrico.

A dualism thus emerged: the separation between the psychic and the physical. Like all dualisms, it plunged philosophy into perplexity and gave rise to the extensive inquiries into human understanding and the critique of reason (Locke, Hume, Kant, etc.).

Despite everything, we continue to uphold this form of rationalism.

As soon as Descartes separated nature from mind, a new psychology emerged, beginning with Hobbes. Hobbes’s naturalism is a form of physicalism, modelled on physicalist rationality.

The soul is attributed a mode of being analogous, in principle, to that of nature, and psychology is gradually overtaken by biology.

This naturalisation of what pertains to the soul is also taken up by Locke.

Spinoza, similarly, holds that not only nature but the totality of being must form a unified rational system. For him, this is a self-evident prerequisite, and even the psychological realm constitutes a unified rational system. Thus, he too participates in this physicalist perspective.

Thanks to this new conception, humanity increasingly dominates the world.

However, something destabilises this approach: mathematical knowledge, as a formation of the mind, belongs precisely to the domain of the mind—that is, to psychology.

This gives rise to a paradoxical skepsis with Berkeley, who challenges the fundamental concepts of mathematics and physics as mere psychological fictions. This marks the culmination of the modern philosophical ideal.

Certainly, these sciences have achieved undeniable successes. Yet, as soon as they are examined from the perspective of psychology, they become incomprehensible: This revolution—the greatest of all—is characterised as a reversal of scientific objectivism: not only that of the Moderns, but of all philosophies spanning millennia, turning objectivism into a transcendental subjectivism ³.

Thus, a struggle emerges between objectivism and transcendentalism.

Husserl characterises these two movements as follows:

Objectivism moves within the terrain of the world, self-evidently given in advance by experience, and its inquiries are directed towards the objective truth of this world, [...] what is in itself ⁴.

Transcendentalism, on the other hand, holds that the sense of being of the world given in life is a subjective construction. Therefore, only a return to subjectivity—which ultimately grounds any validity of the world—can render objective truth comprehensible and disclose the ultimate sense of being of the world.

It is not, then, the being of the world in its unquestioned self-evidence that is primary; rather, what is first in itself is subjectivity, insofar as it naively pre-gives the being of the world, since it is subjectivity that rationalises it ⁵.

Transcendentalism is not mere subjectivism. On the contrary, it stands in opposition to psychological idealism and aspires to establish a new form of scientificity.

Husserl argues that the entire history of philosophy, since the emergence of the "theory of knowledge," is a history of violent tensions between objectivist philosophy and transcendental philosophy ⁶.

Objectivism constantly seeks to reformulate itself in new ways, while transcendentalism strives to overcome the difficulties inherent in the idea of transcendental subjectivity. The origin of this internal tension within the development of philosophy thus requires elucidation.

¹ II,10, p.69
² ibid.
³ II, 13, p.79
⁴ II,14,, 79-80
⁵ ibid., p.80
⁶ ibid., p.81