The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World. Ľubica Učník

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      INTRODUCTION

      BACK TO THE THINGS THEMSELVES?

      In our opinion, Heidegger’s philosophy provided some extremely important prerequisites for a complete rethinking of phenomenology, chiefly inasmuch as it brought to light unnoticed ontological presuppositions in Husserl’s phenomenology. As however Heidegger’s own philosophy took a turn that allowed the theme of “appearing as such” to be dealt with exclusively in connection with the renewal of the problem of Being, Husserl’s problems have since then never been taken up again, though they do not seem to have been simply settled and done with but, on the contrary, rather to have deepened through new inquiries.

      —Jan Patočka¹

      This book started as a puzzlement related to the title of Edmund Husserl’s book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy.² What kind of crisis does Husserl speak about? We know that when Husserl conceived his book, Nazism was coming to power. For Husserl, this was a victory of irrationalism at the heart of Europe: despite a long European history of rational inquiry, most spectacularly embodied in natural science, irrationalism was rising. Yet the problem that he addressed in his book is still with us. Irrationalism—and Husserl’s concern that the reason admired in science is mistrusted and discarded in other domains—is as valid now as it was in his time, going back to the nineteenth century at least. What is the root of this splitting of reason? Why do we distrust reason while we accept scientific reason as the highest achievement of rationality, which began in ancient Greece? It also seems that, more and more, the scientific explanation of meaning—which reduces meaning to an investigation of the material components of the human brain—is not questioned at all. Hence, Husserl’s crisis is still with us, and in need of rethinking.³

      This book, then, is the continuation of a debate both with Husserl and against him. Husserl presented his thinking about the life-world (Lebenswelt) in lectures in Vienna (7 and 10 May 1935) and Prague (12–15 November 1935); eventually the Prague lectures were posthumously published as Crisis.⁴ Yet it is an extension of his early work on the problem of scientific formalization embedded in scientific method, as I discuss in chapter 1. We can formulate the problem as the problem of modern mathematical science, which we accept as the only adjudicator of what constitutes objective knowledge. The problem lies in the question of what constitutes knowledge and how objective knowledge relates to the meaning of the world and human subjective existence.⁵ There are two interrelated issues. One is the question of meaning; hence the title of Husserl’s work, which could be formulated as the crisis of meaning. The other is the trajectory of how the modern conception of nature came about. These issues are related, but they do not overlap in the consideration of the thinkers whom this book presents.

      This problem can, of course, be traced back to the beginning of philosophy in ancient Greece, and could be expressed, paraphrasing Patočka and harking back to Pascal, in this way: “How can we procure meaning from this mute, scientifically conjured-up universe, which is indifferent to our lived experience of the world; which is indifferent to what makes us human?”⁶

THE QUESTION OF MEANING

      This book, then, presents a history of problems related to the human constitution of meaning and the scientific formalization of nature that overrides human experience. The unresolved issue is the transition from understanding nature in a qualitative sense to mathematically mastering it, thereby putting aside questions relating to human existence. The division between nature and humans was conceptualized by René Descartes with his separation of res extensa and res cogitans. The legacy of this reconceptualization of nature is still with us. I offer four different approaches to this quandary. First, I present an outline of Husserl’s work in relation to the problem of the objectification of meaning. Then I consider the continuation, appropriation, and transformation of Husserl’s project by three later thinkers. This debate is bound to continue indefinitely, but my hope is that the clarification of certain presuppositions embedded in the work of these thinkers can help us to reinvigorate our investigations, in what seems to be a debate without answers. Philosophy always strives to present problems that we can all think about and, perhaps, through the debate, shift the ground of those problems. The most difficult thing is our ability to see past the problems and our historical situatedness, to reformulate what is at issue: that is the aim of this book.

      The methodological departure for this project was puzzlement concerning the term “crisis” in the title of Husserl’s book, which seems to refer to a “crisis of meaning.” The problem is that, originally, for Husserl, “meaning” is related to the constitution of meaning; in other words, his insight is that we cannot understand meaning, on the model of British empiricism, as following from the ideas of objects that are imprinted on our minds. Phenomenology discloses that we always see more than is given to us. Ideas are not the intermediary between meaning and things. We do not see ideas but, rather, things themselves. In many ways, acknowledging our participation in the constitution of meaning is the Kantian project. Our mind is not a tabula rasa on which ideas are imprinted from experience. As Leibniz pointed out, there must be something else to “combine” those ideas.⁷

      In Logical Investigations, Husserl starts with a critique of psychologism to show the difference between formal logic and empirical logic—at this point he does not yet address knowledge but considers logic only. We need formal logic to make sense of empirical laws. Expanding his observation to account for knowledge in The Idea of Phenomenology, he introduces his notion of epochē to show that there is a difference between an appearance (a particular appearance of something as something, or noema, as he calls it later) and that which appears (noesis—in other words, adumbration of noema). It is we who, through a synthesis, constitute the meaning of a phenomenon. Phenomena are the meaningful things themselves, as we constitute them. Here there is no crisis of meaning. The project of phenomenology is, as Steven Crowell sums up, that “one simply ‘lives’ in the realm of meaning without СКАЧАТЬ