Husserl’s Philosophy-Science

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In his essay, Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, Edmund Husserl rightly associated the origins of the spiritual with the scientific investigations of the early Greek philosophers. Philosophy is an all-encompassing discipline and, like spirituality, it is concerned with the whole. In order to highlight this process, which has almost been rendered invisible by Judeo-Christian concepts of duality, demanding a necessary division of the scientific from the spiritual, Husserl coined the term philosophy-science.

For Husserl, philosophy-science is a way of thinking which, if inculcated in society, would create a new historicity. We would add that this historicity would, in effect, be the beginning of an authentic human history as such, for it would be the first time that humanity has propelled itself forward for its own cause and with purely environing, spiritual intentions rather than empirically dominating or acclimatising ones.

Husserl argued that scientific achievements have a different kind of temporality to other cultural commodities:

“They do not wear out, they are imperishable … what scientific activity achieves is not real but ideal.”

Ideal achievements are those that give substance to the environing. But science doesn’t guarantee environing; it is an impulse pushing us toward the creation of the Utopia, but if the impulse isn’t taken up by the organising forces and institutions of society itself, then the achievements of science will remain in the banal field of acclimatisation.

Only by embracing a philosophical-science teleology will scientists truly advance toward Culture (with a capital C, by which we mean an authentically human culture). Once embraced though, validities procured through science will be found as material to feed ideals on an even higher level and progress will unfold through becoming and growing in a snowballing fashion of passive accumulation:

“Thus science designates the idea of an infinity of tasks, of which at any time a finite number have already been accomplished and are retained in their enduring validity.”

An enduring validity that creates a permanence running through the ever-changing, always-developing act of becoming.

Knowledge has a quality of permanence and conservation, while at the same time it is the fuel for imagination and the motor for all progressive, transformative change. The scientific telos streams all radiating tasks in the direction of the simple, all-embracing job. Each demonstration of validity is important, if not essential, in the holistic creation of the whole and in the progress towards the understanding and validation of everything that is needed to transform everything in a positive fashion.

Validation comes through the process of making it valid – validity rests itself, therefore, in becoming rather than in being. The desired end is itself impossible to ever really group because absolute Becoming can never ever Be:

“Scientific truth claims to be unconditioned truth, which involves infinity, giving to each factually guaranteed truth a merely relative character, making it only an approach, oriented … toward the infinite horizon, wherein the truth in itself is, so to speak, looked on as an infinitely distant point.”

The infinitely distant nature of that which really is. Infinitely distant but also always actual. The future must always pass through the present. The end depends on the actual.

“Scientific culture, in accord with the ideas of infinity, means, then, a revolutionising of all culture, a revolution that affects man’s whole manner of being as a creator of culture. It means a revolutionising of historicity, which is now the history of finite humanity’s disappearance, to the extent that it grows into a humanity with infinite tasks.”

This growth began with the beginnings of philosophy, when: “man becomes the disinterested spectator, overseer of the world.” But, in an historical sense, we must ask ourselves if we have actually progressed since the classical age of the Greeks, or are we in a process of retrocession? Environing itself has slid into the quagmire of economical environing, developing elaborate macro theories around abstract actions of exchange that have fashioned a competitive and aggressive world based on production for consumption. A world that has very little benefit for neither humanity as a whole nor the world we are overseers of. In this economic world there is very little place for philosophy or for human Culture. Humanity and the world are suffering because of that. Obviously we have our answer to the above question: historically we are lost in a dangerous process of retrocession. A retrocession that will lead to a point of no-return in which we will drop into an abyss of nihilism if Culture and the philosophy it was born from are not allowed to find an historical impetus to push them back into the significance gained by their involvement in the environing world again.

Our world is acclimatised and environed. It is moulded through our practical needs and through our theoretical impulses. However, when the theoretical itself becomes a pragmatism, then the environing process curls back into acclimatisation, thwarting all human progress. This is what happens when the environing is driven by theories of economics.

Money is an abstraction which we cannot seem to live without, and though its inception was to simplify the complexities of exchange it has become something far more important, becoming the a priori of all possible exchanges and hence the a priori of all possible activities. Now, before anything can be done, it seems, money must be taken into consideration.

Because of this, we believe that a successful implementation of Culture can only be possible if we are capable of rethinking our relationship with money: analysing the dictatorial role it plays on our lives and liberating arms that are stifled by that dictatorship in order to allow Humanity to flourish. To achieve this, philosophy-science needs to be applied to the economy in order to create an economic system that is humanly ethical.

Edmund Husserl, PHILOSOPHY AND THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN MAN, 1935, p.6

Ibid, p.7

ibid

Ibid, p.8

Ibid