[. . .] is too one-sidedly oriented to vérités de raison”—or, pure logic unconcerned about things themselves. It is the sixth volume of LI that “brings in necessary clarification in this respect.”112 The only way to reach “an absolutely justified knowledge” is to go back to “original sources,”113 that is, “back to the things themselves”; in other words, back to the world. Husserl’s shift from LI’s truth-in-itself to his call “back to the things themselves” is a shift from formal principles of knowledge to a consideration of “the sense or essence of knowledge” (IP, 25). As Thao points out, “‘That of which we speak,’ the upokeimenon, is not a simple indeterminate and empty substrate: it is the object itself, just as it presents itself in the antepredicative evidence of perception.”114 It is the thing itself, in other words, the meaningful thing, that we experience and that is the starting point for the way we arrive at knowledge of it.
Based on prepredicative experience, this new conception of knowledge is not reduced to truth-in-itself, which is the property of a judgment alone. Rather, evidence is based on the “originary presentive intuition.”115 As Husserl says, “Evidence is [. . .] not some sort of consciousness-index attached to a judgment [. . .] calling to us like a mystic voice from a better world: Here is the truth;—as though such a voice would have something to say to free spirits like us and would not have to show its title to legitimacy.”116 Knowledge is not based on some mysterious process that aligns the thing itself with our knowledge of it. We must reflect upon evidence, work hard to understand its structure and discern the typicalities that are hidden at the first unreflective understanding. Evidence is not something that is freely floating in the world. It is based on our freedom as thinkers who can reflect; distancing ourselves from immediate experience to discover its structural underpinnings. Only by way of reflection can we disclose the structures that can illuminate other instances of our experience. Human freedom means that we can transcend the immediacy of our perception and see beyond the given. By way of phenomenological analysis, we can show that our experience is not reduced to the here and now but is structured by past experiences. Truth is something that guides our thinking, but it cannot be reduced to the predicative judgment. It is the world of our living, the life-world, that informs our judgments.
Yet, if our experience of the world is subjective, “how can singular judgments of fact be valid at all? How can the experienced world even be in truth?”117 As Husserl suggests, it is the case that our experience of the world changes; we need to reflect on how we nevertheless take the world for granted, how it forms the backdrop to our experience and how we anticipate the things we encounter in the world. As he also explains: “Real truth is the correlate of real being, and just as real being is an infinitely distant idea, the idea of a pole for systematic infinities of appearances, of ‘experiences’ in constantly legitimate presumption, so real truth is an infinitely distant idea.”118 It is not the case that truth is somewhere in the world where we can “discover” it once and for all. Truth is a regulative idea that will guide our understanding toward “what is identical in the agreement of experiential judgments” by making us see how “in each [. . .] truth ‘appears,’ [and] achieves legitimate subjective givenness.” Our experience is based on “the pure form of generality which contains all possibilities.” We know that things can deceive us because they show themselves one-sidedly, but we also know that we can approach them, look with more attention, and confirm or disprove our initial beliefs about them.119 Husserl’s insight is that our intuition of a thing is, at first, empty. Only through evidence can we reach a fulfilled intuition and become certain of the thing’s being as we think it is.120
Husserl’s call to return to the things themselves leads him to formulate the principle of all principles.121 As he says in IP, “The proper sense of the principle lies in the constant requirement of sticking with the things that are put in question [. . .] and not [confusing] the problems brought up here with entirely different problems.” He insists that “the clarification of the possibilities of knowledge does not follow the ways of objective science.” It is not “a matter of deducing, inducing, calculating, and the like; and it is not a matter of deriving in a reasoned way new things from things already given, or from things that count as already given” (IP, 64). As he says, to see something is to know, but “seeing cannot be demonstrated or deduced. It is a manifest piece of nonsense to try to clarify possibilities (and immediate possibilities at that) through a logical derivation from non-intuitive knowledge.” His example is of a deaf man. Someone born deaf is told that “there are tones, that harmonies are based on tones, and that a splendid art is derived from them,” but how could he know how those tones lead to something that others call musical compositions? He has never heard any of it; how can he even imagine what music is? To know that there is something that others call music is of no help in considering what this “thing” called music is. “Knowledge of existence would be of no help here; and it would be absurd to propose to deduce the ‘how’ of music” from knowledge that music exists. “It will not do to draw conclusions from the existence of things one merely knows but does not see” (IP, 30).122 Either we know what music is because we have experience of it or we do not. It is not possible to deduce knowledge from somebody’s explanation of music’s existence without my own experience of an opera, for example. No mathematical system can produce knowledge from something that one does not see for oneself.
For Husserl, we can live in truth only if we can reflect on—that is to say, understand—meaning bestowal; if we can see things themselves. Things themselves are the touchstone of truth, the only guarantee that can lead us toward knowledge. To know does not mean to give the ultimate explanation of the world. Knowledge of the world cannot be final: it is always open to corrections, refutations, and reaffirmations. As already pointed out, because formal knowledge is free of experiential content, it is true in itself. By contrast, knowledge of the world cannot itself be reduced to such unchanging truths. However, from this recognition, it does not follow that everything is “true”; that everything goes. Our prepredicative experience shows that we always know that things change; they can delude us, but in the end, by getting closer, by looking from different perspectives, we can correct our judgments about them. Why should it be different in our theoretical considerations? There is a lawful structure to our experience, and, by phenomenological investigations that reveal the lawfulness of our awareness of the world, we can show how our experience of the life-world is made possible.
MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE: THE SCIENCE OF REALITY
The European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis. We are by no means lacking something like nature doctors. Indeed, we are practically inundated by a flood of naïve and excessive suggestions for reform. But why do the so richly developed humanistic disciplines fail to perform the service here that is so admirably performed by the natural sciences in their sphere?123
In his later work, Husserl extends the critique of reason beyond the psychological relativization of logic and questions the mode of scientific, formal knowledge that constitutes another metabasis. The early focus on logic is not abandoned, but is extended to consider the formal knowledge of natural science, which is taken as nature itself.
The metabasis mentioned is the substitution of method for the world. We methodically “construct numerical indices for the actual and possible” res extensae, which we then take as a better rendering of the world in which we live and which is unpredictable by definition. Yet this mathematical manifold proceeds only from “the concretely intuited shapes of the life-world.” Once we transform nature into “a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively scientific truths” (Crisis, § 9h, 51; italics in original), we can hypothetically predict, and therefore master, natural processes. We believe that we are the “regnum hominis,” as Bacon dreamed, and feel like “maîtres et possesseurs de la nature,” as Descartes announced.124 In the process, as Husserl stresses, science is transformed into a “purely theoretical-technical
