would be given during a session titled “The mission of philosophy in our time.” In the previous decade, the mission of philosophy had already made itself quite clear: its mission was to supply modern science with exacting methods to finish its task of knowing everything. Husserl was a mathematician who became a philosopher. If anybody understood how easy it would be to speak of the universe in the exacting terms and objective methods of science—that is, mathematics—it was Husserl. The plot actually gets a bit more complicated than this. With the rise of Nazism in Europe during that time, the Congress was nervous about where their five-star civilization was heading. They were looking for a distraction—something to remind them of all of the wonderful things their scientific outlook had brought them, and not where it was inevitably leading. The mathematician would certainly put it into impressive figures for them.
Husserl was not granted a visa to travel, so he was unable to deliver the paper in person. His paper begins “Science is in Crisis!” We can imagine that this was not what his audience had anticipated. The paper continues,
A crisis of our sciences as such: can we seriously speak of it? Is not this talk, heard so often these days, an exaggeration? After all, the crisis of a science indicates nothing less than that its genuine scientific character, the whole manner in which it has set its task and developed a methodology for it, has become questionable. (1970, p. 3)
In his address, Husserl would carefully outline this thesis statement, arguing that the foundations upon which modern science had been built—the very foundations that had given us the technological marvels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—were in desperate need of review.
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To be sure, much had happened in the last eighty years that has now challenged the nineteenth century brand of modernist metaphysics against which Husserl was arguing in 1934. Indeed, there are circles of continental philosophy and social science that now speak of modernity in the past-tense, recognizing that its impact was impressive but no less limiting and narrow-minded as the medieval thinking it supplanted. Unfortunately, it is my suspicion that the majority of readers never make it that far in the history and philosophy of science. There are social and political reasons for this which I will get to in the chapters that talk about contemporary education. There are many advantages of pretending that philosophy of science ended in the nineteenth century. For one, it allows science to proceed with blinders on, and it gives college students the sense that they have gotten their money’s worth.
This book will examine some of the advantages for the assumption that modernity was the last amendment to science. But above all, it is an attempt to reverse the piece of ontological legislation that was passed by the Vienna Circle in 1924. To be fair, the legislation itself merely echoed the consensus of scientists and philosophers at the time, but this little event gives the travesty a time and place. The travesty is simple, and it frames the structure of what Husserl called The Crisis of European Sciences; it will also frame the structure of this book.
The travesty may be understood as follows: nature is made of processes and things. Processes are complicated systems that are constantly changing and are thus difficult to know in fact. Processes must understand how they work. Things are simple and easy to know in fact because it is believed that they are unchanging. The Vienna Circle eliminated “processes” from the list, leaving only things. The consequences of this are lived by each of us every day.
Before heading into the fields of education, philosophy, and science, I describe what happens when it becomes customary to replace processes with things. Because it is easier to reduce the world to facts about the world, replacing processes with things is commonplace. This is called abstractification. I have borrowed this term from Erich Fromm in his book Sane Society. Fromm, a Marxist scholar and practicing psychoanalyst, describes the psychopathology that necessarily accompanies capitalism. Like Marx, Fromm argues that men and women have become alienated from their own experience, and that it has become perfectly normal to treat yourself and others as though they are things. Fromm calls this psychopathological; Husserl calls this a crisis; I’m simply calling your attention to it.
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This book is really about abstractification, but the word was too cumbersome for a title. You might recognize the root word in there: abstract or abstraction. If you noticed this then you’re on the right track; you defied the odds and managed to learn something despite all of your years of schooling. If in the end you understand the difference between abstraction and abstractification, then you will be able to talk about another person as a thing without forgetting that they are more than this. Indeed, if you understand this, then you can anticipate the chapters that come.
Abstraction is an instance of referring to a process as a thing. For instance, I might call my 2005 AWD Toaster a car. In the South, it’s called a truck. My car has a unique history with me; I have many concrete experiences with it. To understand what this car is to me, you will have to investigate each of these concrete experiences which includes the many trips from Georgia to Michigan, the countless times I have left the windows down before a flash-flood, and the stratified layers of dirt, clay, mud, and grass left there by trail-running shoes. When I call it “the orange car,” I place it into an abstract category that includes a whole assortment of others. You see, this category says nothing of the concrete experiences just mentioned. The abstraction is helpful in a parking lot because you would have some difficulty finding the “one that I have driven back and forth between Georgia and Michigan”; when I say it is “the orange car” then finding it in a parking lot is much easier. You and I understand that I don’t simply mean “the orange car,” but that I still have in mind the many concrete experiences when I talk about my car. It is just that the abstraction is a useful placeholder for now.
Abstractification occurs when I forget that the abstraction is actually just a placeholder. Abstractification is what I do when I replace the concrete experience with the placeholder. For my 2005 AWD Orange Toaster, this would mean replacing all of my experiences with the single thing—“the orange car.” We had just agreed that learning that my car is orange is helpful for finding it in a parking lot, but that it leaves a lot out—most importantly, it leaves out any concrete experience or anything that makes it my car. That is, if you also drive an “orange car” then you know what it’s like to drive my Toaster. Abstractification leaves the concrete out permanently. Furthermore, it assumes that every experience can be understood in terms of things. It assumes that we are nothing but collections of things.
Interestingly enough, the terms “abstraction” and “concretion” seem to have gotten swapped. For instance, when I tell somebody that I study lived experience (that is, concrete experiences), I am often met with the reply “oh that’s too abstract for me.” I never quite know how to respond to this. I can only imagine that it has become unfamiliar to pay attention to one’s experience. Experience has been replaced by the procedure of identifying experiences as things (and then placing them into categories, and so on). Rather than feeling alien to the categories that are used to define us “professor,” “student,” “heterosexual,” “white,” and so on, we feel alien to our own experiences. “Professor” does not capture who I am as a person, and we shouldn’t expect it to. “What does it mean to you to be a professor?” Such a question should be followed by a pause of uncertainty. The uncertainty highlights the complexity (or unfamiliarity) of concrete experience. Instead we say, “I don’t know what that means; that’s too abstract for me.” However, we are often perfectly satisfied with a basic categorization when we meet someone; it is easier to think about them as a thing and not as a complicated process.
We buy coffee from the barista at the shop on the corner. We forget that the barista is a person with a unique biography, and that on this particular day our path crossed with theirs. At that moment, the manifestation of their being is in tandem with the actualization of your own.1 “But that’s too abstract for me.” No, “concrete” is the word that troubles you. The situation
