Category: husserl

A note on fact and meaning

My interest in working through Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences has waxed and waned.  This is probably due to the sharp transition I feel in moving from Kierkegaard’s style to the more straightforward work of ‘real’ philosophy.  What has kept my attention though is Husserl’s genuine impression of having discovered something and of its significance and secondly of the fact that in historical context the work he did has had tremendous historical significance.  So what is he doing?  I understand a primary motivation of his work to be a method of thinking subjectivity scientifically.  How can I be included in scientific investigation?  For this reason the natural sciences and mathematics always play a secondary (but certainly not disparaged) role.  These secondary sciences work from the assumptions of a pre-given world that accord with our experience of that world.  These sciences always rest on something prior.  So Husserl is trying to carry out to completion Descartes’s emphasis on the primacy of the ego.  But the ego is not a ‘premise’ from which the rest of knowledge is deduced.

The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it.  One must finally achieve the insight that no objective science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense. To deduce is not to explain.  To predict, or to recognize the objective forms of composition of physical or chemical bodies and predict accordingly – all this explains nothing but is in need of explanation.  The only true way to explain is to make transcendentally understandable. (Crisis, 189)

This is not particularly shocking to anyone with exposure to philosophical hermeneutics but it is a helpful reminder for what continues presently to be a common and serious misconception, namely, that scientific findings are self-evidently meaningful.  These findings are framed as such because they give the air of authority and therefore power to various expressions.  While I am not sure I will follow Husserl in his own project I think this point remains sound.

High school wisdom

I have never studied philosophy institutionally.  This is, almost, a fact.  When I was in high school a few students were selected (how I don’t know) to participate in the University of Winnipeg’s Mini-U program which was a week’s worth of classes on a topic of the student’s choosing.  I chose philosophy (why I don’t know).  I remember the basic outlines of certain sessions.  We looked at theories of essence in which a knife was evaluated by its knifiness.  I remember making a comment and the professor saying I was a closet Nietzschian (I remember neither the comment nor do I know why it would have been associated with Nietzsche).  I remember being told that a dog does not think.  I remember some high school bantering about how truth can be known.

What I remember most, though, was coming across Zeno’s paradox.  I will go from memory so I don’t need to worry about accuracy.  Zeno’s paradox explores the nature of two simultaneous and seemingly conflicting processes.  As I remember it the paradox was described (either in the original context or taught as an example) as a race in which the runner has a clear start and finish.  However, during that run a mathematical process also occurs or can at least describe the runner.  Mathematically the space can be divided into halves.  Halving a finite space, however, is an infinite process.  A half can always be mathematically halved.  How can an infinite mathematic process be completed within a finite progression?  I am probably stating this horrendously.  However, Zeno’s paradox came back to mind as I am reading Husserl in which he attempts to outline the faulty thinking of science in assuming that objective and abstract processes can be the basis for all knowledge, when in reality “the objective is precisely never experienceable as itself.” So Husserl attempts to move back into understanding what a science of the subjective could be.

And more than this Zeno’s paradox came to mind with this image from a newly added blog to my feed, Fuck Theory.

Finally we meet

You know, you just don’t here this kind of confidence anymore.  Here is the final paragraph of Part I of Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences.

Yet, over and above this, the more concrete critical analyses of the conceptual structures of the Kantian turn, and the contrast between it and the Cartesian turn, will set in motion out own concurrent thinking in such a way as to place us, gradually and of its own accord, before the final turn and the final decisions.  We ourselves shall be drawn into an inner transformation through which we shall come face to face with, to direct experience of, the long-felt but constantly concealed dimension of the “transcendental.”  The ground of experience, opened up in its infinity, will then become the fertile soil of a methodical working philosophy, with the self-evidence, furthermore, that all conceivable philosophical and scientific problems of the past are to be and decided by starting from this ground.

I for one am looking forward to coming face to face to the ‘transcendental’.  I hope it lives up to the hype.