manual cannot help us to answer questions such as: Why do we take for granted the transcendent world? How does “this ‘idealization’” come about, and why do we not “wonder about the origin of things”?24 In the end, Husserl notes, these questions lead to further “wonder”: How did it come about that science posits the knowledge of mathematical nature as primary? Why do we take for granted that the scientific conversion of “sensible causalities into mathematical causalities” gives us “mathematical, true nature,”25 which “becomes” the true world while the world of our living is relegated to its fuzzy manifestation?
For Husserl, then, to understand the correlation between our subjective thinking and the world is to reflect on the nature of knowledge. It is to show that we can know objects in the world; and, further, that the transformation of the world as it was performed by modern natural science is based on things in the world, on the life-world. To grasp the meaning of the world and our existence within it, we have to go back to the beginning. Phenomenology, by going back to the things themselves, can show us not only that “the enigma of all enigmas” is merely apparent, but also that scientific mathematical knowledge does not precede our knowledge of the world; its structure is erected from things themselves. Finally, as in Husserl’s last writing, phenomenology can make clear why the idea of modern science based on the mathematization of nature is problematic: it fails to account for our existence in the world.
Thus, according to Husserl, the phenomenological method is the way toward things themselves. Yet we need to understand the method first. Otherwise, it would be like explaining Pythagoras’s theorem that a2 + b2 = c2 without knowing that it expresses a relation concerning the sides of the right-angle triangle in Euclidean geometry.26 Likewise, we cannot pass judgment on phenomenology if we do not know what phenomenology actually is. As Husserl warns, “Phenomenology is not ‘literature’ by means of which one goes riding for pleasure, as it were, while reading. [. . .] One must [. . .] work in order to acquire a methodically schooled eye and only thereby the capability of making one’s own judgment.”27 To do so, one must be able to give reasons for every step in one’s thinking; to validate judgments by enabling others to extend the method. Phenomenology is the continuation of the journey that began in ancient Greece, the journey from δόξα (doxa) to ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē).
DEFENSE OF REASON
By defending the idea of reason, Husserl fights to safeguard the European intellectual heritage. He fights to redeem “reason” from relativistic interpretations and to reinstate it to its proper place, which reason and reasoning has held since Plato and Aristotle. As Plato and Aristotle conceived of it, reason is an answer to wonder, θαυμαζω (thaumazo), leading to philosophy, love of wisdom.28 As Husserl explains, “In the breakthrough of philosophy [. . .] in which all sciences are thus contained, I see [. . .] the primal phenomenon of spiritual Europe.”29 Once established, “philosophy, science, is the title for a special class of cultural structures.”30
For Husserl, the idea of reason implicates logic as the domain of purely formal laws. The unacceptable alternative to a “pure” logic grounded formally would be the empirical logic of John Stuart Mill, for whom logic is nothing more than “a mere assemblage of psychological chapters, offered with the intention to regulate knowledge practically,”31 thereby making logic dependent on our thinking, instead of being its benchmark. According to Husserl, Mill’s account of logic—based on our mental states (psychologism) or our human biology (anthropologism)—becomes relative, supposedly dependent on the situation humans find themselves in. The foundation of knowledge is eliminated. Skepticism concerning knowledge becomes the reigning dogma.
According to Husserl, “It is reason which ultimately gives meaning to everything that is thought to be, all things, values, and ends.” We understand everything around us according to the “normative relatedness to what, since the beginning of philosophy, is meant by the word ‘truth’—truth in itself—and correlatively the term ‘what is’—οντως ον [ontos on, Being]” (Crisis, § 5, 12–13). Once we deny the correlation between truth and Being—in other words, between reason and the world—epistēmē becomes a riddle. For Husserl, in our age “the sense of the word ‘truth’ has been totally altered by relativism.” According to relativists, there is no single truth but only different, contingent truths relative to our situation in the world. Yet the meaning of “truth” that relativists use is still based on an idea of truth that is extrapolated from its original usage in logic, which is, as Husserl notes, “the only sense we all employ when we talk of truth. In a single sense there is only a single truth, in an equivocal sense there are naturally as many ‘truths’ as there are equivocal uses” (LI, § 36, 80).
The problem that Husserl recognizes is: when our “faith in ‘absolute’ reason, through which the world has its meaning, the faith in the meaning of history, of humanity, the faith in [human] freedom, that is, [our] capacity to secure rational meaning for [our] individual and common human existence” is lost, the descent into skepticism is inevitable (Crisis, § 5, 13). The problem of skepticism is not some academic preoccupation of a lonely philosopher but has real repercussions for everyday living. If reason—this touchstone of truth—is relativized, all reasoning becomes suspect. By extension, if reasoning cannot provide justification for our claims about the world, human existence seems to be without any rational basis. It becomes meaningless.32 As Husserl notes in his last work, if the idea of reason is eliminated as superfluous because it is conflated with reasoning about facts, then society is in crisis because it lacks a firm foundation. To avoid such grave consequences, Husserl strives to elucidate the confusion of our age, “a collapse of the belief in ‘reason,’ understood [by] the ancients” as epistēmē (Crisis, § 5, 12). His struggle is against the substitution of epistēmē with doxa: changeable opinions that are presented without reasons to support them.
Husserl starts with psychological investigations in Philosophy of Arithmetic, only to become dissatisfied with the smuggling of psychological explanation into the system of formal knowledge, and thus opening a door to skepticism and relativism. As he says later, logic reduced to psychology becomes “a psychologistically determined technology of correct thinking.”33 Husserl realizes that by using a psychological type of explanation, “an unnoticed μετάβασις εις αλλο γένος [metabasis eis allo genos]” (LI, § 2, 13) changes the foundation of knowledge into Mill’s “mere assemblage of psychological chapters” (LI, § 13, 30), cited above.
As an example of this unnoticed metabasis, Husserl identifies the problematic fusion of logic and psychology. Formal logic—the systematic inquiry into the formal structures of reasoning—is by its very nature independent of experience, whereas psychology investigates human experience. As Husserl points out, the merging of these two different types of investigation constitutes the metabasis leading to “the setting up of invalid aims” because “the employment of methods [is] wrong in principle, not commensurate with the discipline’s true objects.” Disregarding, or forgetting, that formal logic is independent of experience, “the genuinely basic propositions and theories are shoved, often in extraordinary disguises, among wholly alien lines of thought, and appear as side-issues or incidental consequences” (LI, § 2, 13). This category mistake, as we would call it today, following Gilbert Ryle,34 or the conflation of dissimilar categories by treating them as the same, “can have the most damaging consequences” for understanding the lines of inquiry that are the aims of each science (LI, § 2, 13). By treating heterogeneous categories as the same (psychology, based on empirical investigations leading to hypothetical “laws of nature”; and logic, with its formal laws), empirical psychology is mistakenly posited as the foundation of formal knowledge. Since Aristotle, on the contrary, knowledge, by definition, is about principles that are timeless. In our modern phraseology, principles are independent of our mental states, which are happenings in
