Husserl starts from mathematics, but he develops a phenomenology, where each emergence is nothing but its impression on the subject. No genetic or theoretical frame imposes itself on the experience. It is to be comprehended in its pure being and carries no implication about the existence of facts.

  The way we apply our phenomenological concepts to real objects is termed intention, a term borrowed from medieval scholastics. To purify the object of phenomenological discourse, one has to apply what Husserl terms “bracketing” (epoché), which is supposed to free the phenomenon from its standard references to the world. In this mood, the influence of the external world fades away and only the ego with its categories remains. However any Being carried by categories of cognition indicates a mode of potential empirical existence. What is experienced through our intuition is to be comprehended but only as it offers itself directly.

  The world is accidental and only the awareness of the pure ego carries meaning. The transcendental world is totally conditioned on the individual awareness. All real entities are constituted by the intellect. Such an intellect presupposes the existence of consciousness which assigns it meanings.

  The question is: “How does the object come into the epistemic possession of the thinking person?” We can use ordinary experience and ordinary language but not any scientific or logical principles. Phenomenology must remain pure,

  Knowledge has to be based on experience not on conventions. To know something is to be able to recognize it. The person posits ideal objects as belonging to “reality”. In addition to physical objects, there are objects like “4” and its ilk. They can be the subject to false or true statements,

  Husserl introduces the concept of “eidic science” to eliminate the dependence on accidental contingent facts. The general has to be deduced from the individual case. The only purely eidic science presently in existence is mathematics. (p.201) Phenomenology must be distanced from all natural sciences as well as from all inherently naturalistic views. Husserl believed that the self‐evidence characteristic of “12 × 12 = 144” could be found also in other fields of human knowledge.

  Consciousness is not part of the world at all, because it is the reason there is a world for us in the first place. It does not create the world, but the world is opened up for consciousness. There is no conceivable world without consciousness. Husserl's concept of “epoché of reduction” is taken to lead to objectivity constituted out of subjectivity. The world is a product of a constituting ego. This ego is beyond the world. It gives the possibility to understand the world. The transcendental subjectivity within a communalized life constitutes an objective world, which is the same for everyone. The life world is between the world of nature and the world of culture.

  And expressions refer to an object; not only do they have meaning but also reference (Frege's Sinn and Bedeutung). Sentences are true because states‐ of‐affairs make for truths. According to Husserl it is in words and language that things first come into being. Husserl's act of positing a world eventually makes him leave his commitment to realism. Everything that enters consciousness can be studied by phenomenology. This leads Husserl to a version of transcendental idealism. All meanings and essences are engraved on the transcendental ego. He has also been accused of eventually becoming a pure idealist.

  Husserl's methodological solipsism is not regarded as a reliable method in science. Many philosophers deny the possibility to separate the empirical from the a priori in our knowledge. The teaching of Husserl seems to me to be an attempt to impose a conception of consciousness on a Kantian frame of categories of the mind. The influence of scientific discoveries beyond the everyday experience makes the move unable to compete with other more modern philosophies of science. His grand enterprise to erect a cathedral of theory over the individual experience of the world could not work.

  8.3.3. The crises in European science

  Due to the dynamic character of Husserl's writings, any brief summary, like the one above, is necessarily misleading. A fair presentation should follow the treatment in its evolution with time. Here this has fallen outside my aim with the introduction of his thinking. As a lingering ideal from the great systems of the nineteenth century, he represents the failure of the past approaches, To state the point more succinctly, I choose to comment more on one of his latest works, The Crises [103] published originally in German in 1936. The editors have based the text on his writings but do not necessarily give a proper picture of his actual ideas. However, its topics are most directly related to the present investigation.

  Husserl's concept of the “Crisis” does not signify any failure of the scientific endeavor. On the contrary, it derives to a large extent from its spectacular (p.202) success. This, however, derives from a demarcation of science from the natural world of experience, which is the only world where a human can live.

  The problem can be traced back to Galilei, who introduced the idea that nature can be understood in terms of an idealized mathematical model. This view has been perpetuated by the sciences up to the present time. All scientific results depend on replacing the naturally experienced concept by an ideal model which can be treated by manipulating the signs constituting the abstract structure. The scientific treatment is not exact but only carried out using exact terms. The result emerging may be exactly derived within the model but it can only be applied to human reality by intuitive interpretations.

  The conclusion is that the original motivation for the idealization is forgotten. The historical and social roots of the science are lost, and the mathematical model is identified with reality. What cannot be observed and captured in numbers does not exist. Positivism becomes the prevalent creed, and it is forgotten that positivism itself is a metaphysical presumption. This attitude is sometimes termed “scienticism” and considered to resemble a religious conviction. It does, indeed, miss the need to integrate scientific experience with ordinary human life. What is not scientifically meaningful is illusionary and irrelevant. According to Husserl:

  In our vital need—so we are told—this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence. Do not these questions, universal and necessary for all men, demand universal reflections and answers based on rational insight? In the final analysis they concern man as a free, self‐determining being in his behaviour toward the human and extrahuman surrounding world and free in regard to his capacities for rationally shaping himself and his surrounding world.

  The solution is to recover the roots of the sciences and by the methods of Husserl's phenomenology situate the empire of knowledge in its proper place in human life. The concept of “truth” may carry different meaning in the contexts of realities such as emotional, social or moral issues. Only by situating oneself within the original historical and social framework, can the individual grasp the significance of knowledge in human life. Experience of such transcendental truths is acquired only by philosophical contemplation carried out by the individual. The result is, however, a genuinely human world which can be shared by everyone.

  The full conception of the phenomenological world resides in what Husserl terms the “life world” (Lebenswelt). This comprises the totality of the human sensational experience melted together with all aspects of culture and science. In this world live both the emotional and the rational aspects of humans. In its multifarious conglomerate, it may well carry part of the meaning of Wittgenstein's concept of a “life form”. The difference is that Husserl hopes for a unified view of the total reality.

  (p.203) All the occasional (even “philosophical”) reflections which go from technical work back to true meaning always stop at idealized nature; they do not carry out the reflection radically, going back to the ultimate purposes which the new science, together with the geometry, which is inseparable from it, growing out of prescientific life and its surrounding world, was from the beginning supposed to serve a purpose which necessarily lay in this prescientific life and was related to its life world.

  Husserl grasps the modern trend to found the philosophical world in the singular experiences of the individual, just like Wittgenstein and Bohr in their respective realms, but he was seriously in conflict with them concerning his motivation. Human consciousness and things in themselves have disappeared just through the scientific progress decried by Husserl. His philosophical method was based on essences and introspection which are not regarded as valid tools any longer. Rightly or wrongly, modern philosophy does not allow one to conclude anything about the entities behind the phenomena represented in language.

  The futility of his method was eventually acknowledged even by Husserl in 1935: “Philosophy as a method in rigorous science is a dream which is over.” Thus ended an ambitious and global attempt to bring the world back into an ordered shape. We have to live with the fragments that remain.

  Let us turn to the final verdict on the existential movement of philosophy as seen by Hermann Weyl. He was a student of Husserl but turned away from his teachings because of his experience of modern science and its description in terms of innovatively created symbolic frames. This he saw most blatantly exhibited by Husserl's main successor, Martin Heidegger. Weyl states [68]:

  Phenomenology had lunged out in all directions beyond the narrow boundaries of sensual data, but still its pure ego was like a spirit soaring above the waters, untainted by worldliness, and it was hard to conceive how it could ever surrender its immanence and become flesh, man among men.

  9 Metaphysics and reality

  9.1. What can we know?

  9.1.1. Embedding knowledge into reality

  Each human being is a complete world. He does not experience a world, construct a world, or live a world. Nay, being aware of sense impressions, conscious meditation, introspective impulses, and the stream of thought, he is a unified entity which is not an assembly of these but the active subject determined by all of them. It is also experienced as senseless not to accept one's experience of social conditions by others as equal with the experienced self.

  The human complex is the object of all that is knowable and the object for investigation by all activities worthy of the name science. By constituting simultaneously the agent recognizing regularities and correlations between various aspect of his being, the individual modifies his vision of reality, thus building up what he regards as knowledge. The characteristic expression of cognitive efforts is to present the results of thinking in the framework of language. Its use is a multifarious activity, which ascribes life's various situations to others more or less unambiguously. As the variety of situations encountered differs both in its physiological aspects and psychological significance, language can only capture a limited part of reality at any one time. The linguistic reality we live in is fragmented and incomplete, but it is capable of changing and adapting to extended experience.

  By constructing technical devices and designing measurements man has enriched his potentialities to make formal models, games, and symbolic systems. These extend the tools of language and form the foundations for all our knowledge.

  Knowledge is thus the formation of partial maps of experiences conditioned by our mental developments and abilities. However, when relating to the reactions of the individual person or the more exact results of measurements only correlations between observed data can be established. Linguistic analysis can only answer the question “How” but not the question “Why”. The ultimate causes remain out of reach.

  Living is the emergence of the human totality which seems to proceed from the biological necessity inherited through the species. No formal analysis is guiding this, but ordinarily linguistic ability develops along with the conscious personality. As the child learns to act, he learns to comment on his actions and the surrounding ambience. The formal description comes from learning abstract (p.205)systems and mathematical models. This development is regularly observed but still remains the ultimate human mystery.

  Thus in spite of all accumulated knowledge, our understanding is strongly limited. Why do we experience consciousness, and why can we analyze and affect the processes of microscopic physics? We do not even know the limits of our mental tools.

  Even if we can describe the outcomes of any isolated physical experiment very accurately, we cannot derive the macroscopic world where our daily life takes its course. Even if we, one day, could measure all physical processes in our brains and correlate them to mental experiences, we might not be able to derive the concepts of common consciousness. Have we, possibly, encountered some fundamental demarcation between different conceptual nexuses?

  The problem is that even our best scientific achievements only give correlations not causes. The activity is purely epistemological relating the posited entities and phenomena to each other. The actual origin and character of these is not reached by our present scientific methods.

  9.1.2. On what there is and is not

  The ultimate elements of our symbolic representations have not been disclosed by their success. What there really is falls outside the explanations of science. Theories contain no necessary ontology but stand in need of a sufficient one.

  In formal mathematical frameworks, the elements are defined by their role as signs operated on by rules. Else they are nothing. Thus different models may be shown to be isomorphic in fitting all the axiomatic features of the structure.

  In physics, matter consists of atoms, atoms consist of nuclei and electrons; these consist of quarks, gluons, and leptons; these consist of “???”. No theory, so far, predicts the numbers and properties of these building blocks. Will we ever be able to do so?

  It is a possibility that our way of approaching science is incapable of settling ontological issues. In order to proceed with science, the researcher has to assume that something exists; the activity of research must assume that the concepts developed can be asserted to apply to something, or alternatively fail to do so. The best proof of an external world is that even the best formulated theory may turn out to be incorrect. Any statement about nature may turn out to be false. Thus the best argumentation for a correspondence theory of truth is that such a correspondence may be shown to be wrong. It is not what there is that determines our image of reality but more appropriately what there is not. This is a generalization of Popper's falsification theory.

  If the positing of an element x is defined by the truth of some proposition p(x) being true, it is of central importance to know what state of affairs is excluded by the truth of ¬p(x). It is essential: not only do we need to know what is the case, but even more what is shown not to be the case. This is the scientific version of the logical problem of defining negation.

  (p.206) For each situation that is the case, there are in reality more possibilities for it not to be the case. Thus only in Wittgestein's logic are the spaces of a concept and its negation of the same size. For anything imagined, there are more things that we cannot imagine. Reality is too multifarious to be captured by any closed system of formalism.

  9.2. Beyond the veil of endeavors

  9.2.1. Leeway for beliefs

  I have claimed that science is epistemology but fails to provide a well‐ defined ontology. This allows for the challenging opinion that even if all scientific questions have been decided, there is still an unfathomable realm of concepts and relations which are fully consistent with all known. We are free to select and choose what we believe constitutes ultimate reality.

  In the logical and mathematical world this manifests itself in Gödel's theorem. There are more statements that can be declared true than what can be proved in any fixed system. If we identify a statement as undecidable, we only need to look for an extended model of the system to make it true or false. Here we are free to choose; no single choice is necessary.

  In physics our theories are not strictly logically formal, but based on heuristic and intuitive use of formalism. Still the sum total of what we think we know is a limited amount of information. It can never be complete and closed to re‐interpretations of the basic concepts. And this is good: if it were not the case, science would know no progress.

  So what do we have to believe about the fabric of reality? How do we choose what to found our lives on? We may want to live in a rationally constructed world, but this has usually failed to emerge. Emotional attitudes break through and may, in extreme cases, break down the illusions of one's life. Alternatively, various ideologies supply frames where one may find a model for conducting one's life. A most developed system of this type is offered by the various religions whatever their origin may be.

  In the discussion about certainty carried out by Moore, Wittgenstein, and von Wright we found that all cognitive activity must be based on the received view supplied by the collected wisdom of the time and place we are born into. Only by recognizing what we presume known, can we proceed to question individual results. Something can be shown wrong only with respect to all the features of consensus teaching. Successful testing of an individual theoretical proposition also serves as a test of the whole theoretical game. Eventually enough internal conflict will lead to a total revision of the whole system: the Kuhnian revolutions are, however, rare.

 

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