as belonging to the real surrounding world, i.e., mastery over himself and his fellow man, an ever greater power over his fate, and thus an ever fuller ‘happiness’—‘happiness’ as rationally conceivable for man” (Crisis, § 12, 66)—as if happiness could be transformed into a set of numbers and then turned into a controllable process regulated by rational method; changing human fate into a predictable and thereby controllable event.
The problem is that all this euphoria about the possibility of rationally understanding nature and mastering the world of our living has proved to be a mirage. But does it mean that the problem is rationality? This is the fight that Husserl undertakes. As he says, we must “carry out a responsible critique” by becoming the autonomous thinkers (Selbstdenker) (Crisis, § 15, 72; italics in original) who show that this technical mastery is an abomination of the original Greek insight as to what epistēmē—rational knowledge—is.
Husserl wants neither to condemn the sciences, nor to have recourse to “mysticism.” He wants to show “to what extent the sciences are one-sided, [by] giving theoretical formulation only to certain sides of actual reality.” For Husserl, this substitution of the world with “a well-fitting garb of ideas” needs to be revisited by showing how it is based on our originary experience of things themselves, which are then transposed into the mathematical manifold and manipulated as being separate from, and somehow “more true” than, the world of our living. In Husserl’s view, we must be responsible for our knowledge by showing both the ground from which our knowledge is constituted and how “the primal ground of Intuitive givenness” can lead to “an all-round and complete knowledge.”125
In order to understand Husserl’s analysis, let us reconsider Aristotle again. For Aristotle, physical objects are irreducible to mathematics. In the words of Aristotle, “The more physical of the branches of mathematics, such as optics, harmonics, and astronomy,” cannot be reduced to geometry. The ancient Greeks’ understanding of optical reflection was derived from the observation of physical bodies. As Aristotle writes, “Optics investigates mathematical lines” not as mathematical, but rather as physical, as belonging to the body.126 He says that “‘flesh’ and ‘bone’ and ‘man’” are described by physical attributes and not geometrical ones. Socrates’ nose was a “snub nose”; however, we moderns reduce a snub nose to geometrical language, speaking of a “curved” nose. Not so Aristotle: Aristotle insists that the line of the nose is curved but not the nose itself.127 Formalization is not an abstraction of something in general but relates to and considers the things in the world. It would not make sense to him to abstract from the world as we live it.
“KNOW-HOW”
Following Galileo’s inauguration of modern physics, the transformation from the idea of wisdom, as the ancient Greeks understood it, into technical “know-how” was completed. This transformation, in effect, was a move from the world that we live in to the mathematical manifold that science can account for without ambiguity. According to Husserl, “The essential process of the new constitution of strict science” is defined by a transformation of knowledge from “the intuitions of profound thought into unambiguous, rational configurations.”128 This is why Husserl insists that “true science, as far as its teaching reaches, knows no profound thought. Every piece of completed science is the total of steps of thinking each of which is immediately transparent; and hence not profound at all.”129 As already noted, for the ancient philosophers this way of thinking was not a possibility, since their θεωρία (theoria) was the contemplation of nature in which they lived.130
By contrast, in our time, “the emergence of algebra [. . .] made [. . .] possible for the first time the advance to a purely formal logic” (FTL, § 12, 49); that is, logic free of empiricity. The merger of mathematics and logic is the Leibnizian idea of mathesis universalis (FTL, § 24, 74, 80; see also § 34, 49). Husserl suggests that mathematical sciences became “the garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical theories,” shrouding the life-world under the notion of “‘objectively actual and true’ nature.” The problem is that “we take for true being what is actually a method—a method which is designed for the purpose of progressively improving, in infinitum, through ‘scientific’ predictions, those rough predictions which are the only ones originally possible within the sphere of what is actually experienced and experienceable in the life-world.” For us, the methodological garb of ideas represents the life-world; in the process, the life-world itself disappears. Husserl identifies a further problem. The “formulae, the ‘theories,’ remained unintelligible” because ideas were disguised as the world, obscuring “the true meaning of the method.” Moreover, this “naïve formation of the method, was never understood” (Crisis, § 9h, 51–52; italics in original).
Hence, Husserl shows that the relationship between the method and the world was never clarified. He notes that this new mathematics becomes “a theoretical technique,” giving rise to “the new problem—that of a formal ontology” (FTL, § 24, 76; italics in original).
On the one hand, Husserl is adamant in preserving the idea of formal knowledge, which will keep at bay skepticism and relativism; at the same time, he recognizes the other side of this problem, that is, the reduction of the world in which we live, the life-world, into a pale reflection of the mathematized, formal world of science. According to Husserl, the problem is that the idea of formal ontology, derived from Leibniz’s idea of mathesis universalis, lost its formal character and became “a merely empirical technology for a sort of intellectual productions [sic] having the greatest practical utility and going by the name ‘science’—a technology adjusted empirically to practical results” (FTL, 16).
The result of the never-clarified idea “of a formal ontology” (FTL, § 24, 76; italics in original) is the forgetting of the natural world in preference to mathematical hypotheses, leading to “The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology.”131
GALILEO: A DISCOVERING AND A CONCEALING GENIUS
Husserl points out that this is not a fortuitous development, and he traces his historical analysis back to Galileo, “a discovering and a concealing genius.”132 In a sense, Galileo reversed tradition; until then, although no longer commonly remembered as such, geometry took as its basis intuited nature, and defined certain privileged shapes—line, point, square—as ideal shapes that could be understood by everybody. Yet nature was still understood as the basis for these ideal shapes. In answer to the Sophists, Plato’s search for the certainty of knowledge led him to base it on the model of geometry, as it was in his time. To recall Plato, if I can draw a line in the sand, I can imagine that if I do not stop, if I am not bound by the finite world of my everyday living, the line can go on and on forever. From this insight, I can imagine the idea of infinity. If I draw a triangle, none of the ones I draw are perfect, but I can imagine one that is absolutely perfect and that will become the form of a perfect triangle in which all the finite triangles thought or drawn by humans will participate. The ideal triangle will be a model that cannot ever appear in the world but that will guide our finite thinking from then on. It is then possible to show that there must be a domain that is guiding our finite human thinking: the domain that is a foundation of epistēmē, knowledge, as opposed to doxa.
The Platonic answer was still derived from the world in which he lived. His perfect “reality,” the domain of Ideas or Forms, was immaterial. Material nature participated in the immaterial Forms. By contrast, by the time this tradition reached Galileo, it was already sedimented. Geometry was refined and he simply turned it around, declaring that nature is written in triangles and circles.133 For Galileo, immaterial Forms become the matter: nature is essentially mathematical.134
Galileo “divorced” nature from geometry and posited the ideal shapes as primary: “The geometrical ideal shape [. . .] functions as a guiding pole” (Crisis, §
