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It wasn't until the later nineteenth century that Germany became a country of any note. As
Chancellor, Bismarck changed Germany from a backward nation to the most technologically
advanced nation in Europe. He accomplished this with a total disregard of the social costs and
treated his liberal opponents unmercifully. But he did in fact create a powerful Germany which
was respected throughout Europe. We have already seen, in our discussions of the evolution of
Western thought, how important the faith of a people in their own culture contributes to their
faith in a source of truth. So, in the latter nineteenth century a German, Husserl, suggested that
through Phenomenology, philosophy could become a science. By this he meant science in the
ancient Greek meaning of the word, of knowledge of what cannot be different than it is.
Phenomenology, Husserl said, can lead to a science that is
not possible through natural philosophy because natural philosophy depends for all of its
knowledge on knowledge of the existence of things in nature. In spite of the fact that physical
being is not the only kind of being.
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Only the spatiotemporal world of bodies is nature in the significant sense of the word. All
other being, i.e., the psychical, is nature in the secondary sense, a fact that determines
basically essential differences between the methods of natural science and psychology. In
principle, only corporeal being can be experienced in a number of direct experiences, i.e.,
perceptions, as individually identical. Hence, only this being can, if the perceptions are
thought of as distributed among various "subjects," be experienced by many subjects as
individually identical and be described as intersubjectively the same. The same realities
(things, procedures, etc.) are present to the eyes of all and can be determined by all of us
according to their "nature." Their "nature," however, denotes: presenting themselves in
experience according to diversely varying "subjective appearances."
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If you can recall the problem of Plato and Aristotle. They had to account for the existence of
scientific knowledge, that is knowledge that could not be different than it is, that is unchanging, in
the face of the Hericlitean problem that the world of experience is constantly changing. The
problem that Husserl was faced with is the Humean problem, that knowledge can only be of
relations of ideas in the mind and can never be of facts. The Kantian explanation that we can
learn about things in the world by applying a-priori categories to them , but we could never be
sure we are right, was not a science in the sense that Husserl was trying to develop. Therefore
this explanation of "Nature" was an explanation of what knowledge of the existence of corporeal
entities means.
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Nevertheless they stand there as temporal unities of enduring or changing properties, and
they stand there as incorporated in the totality of one corporeal world that binds them all
together, with its one space and its one time. They are what they are only in this unity;
only in the causal relation to or connection with each other do they retain their individual
identity (substance), and this they retain as that which carries "real properties." All
physical real properties are causal. Every corporeal being is subject to laws of possible
changes, and these laws concern the identical, the thing, not by itself but in the unified,
actual, and possible totality of the one nature. Each physical thing has its nature (as the
totality of what it, the identical, is by virtue of being the union point of causalities within
the one all-nature. Real properties (real after the manner of things, corporeal) are a title
for the possibilities of transformation of something identical, possibilities preindicated
according to the laws of causality. And thus this identical, with regard to what it is, is
determinable only by recourse to these laws. Realities, however, are given as unities of
immediate experience, as unities of diverse, sensible appearances. Stabilities, changes, and
relationships of change (all of which can be grasped sensible) direct cognition everywhere,
and function for it like a "vague" medium in which the true, objective, physically exact
nature presents itself, a medium through which thought (as empirically scientific thought)
determines and constructs what is true.
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However, is this actually what empirical scientific knowledge has developed? Not really, Husserl
said, for the acknowledgement that what is experienced by many exists empirically does not
constitute knowledge of what it is. For knowledge of what a thing is, is determined through the
application of scientific laws. What has been learned through the application of these laws is not
the thing, it is the essence of the thing. As such it is what has been constructed by thought. And
thus has not actually been derived from experience.
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All that is not something one attributes to the things of experience and to the experience
of things. Rather it is something belonging inseparable to the essences of things in such a
way that every intuitive and consistent investigation of what a thing in truth is (a thing
which as experienced always appears as something, a being, determined and at the same
time determinable, and which nevertheless, as appearances and circumstances vary, is
constantly appearing as a different being) necessarily leads to causal connections and
terminates in the determination of corresponding objective properties subject to law.
Natural science, then, simply follows consistently the sense of what the thing pretends to
be as experienced, and calls this--vaguely enough--"elimination of secondary qualities."
And that is more than an obscure expression; it is a bad theory regarding a good
procedure.
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Therefore, he said, empirical methods can never lead to a true science.
For it is essences and not things in themselves which are the
modules of scientific knowledge.
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For true nature in its proper scientific sense is a product of the spirit that investigates
nature, and thus the science of nature presupposes the science of the spirit. The spirit is
essentially qualified to exercise self-knowledge, and as scientific spirit to exercise scientific
self-knowledge, and that over and over again.
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Returning to Descartes Cogito, what was indubitable, was the I that thinks. For Descartes the I
that thinks is something that exists in the world and the problem of philosophy is that of learning
about the world in which the I exists. From our discussion of nature above we can see that there
is never a question in Husserl's mind concerning the existence of the world. But, he said, to arrive
at true science we must make the "phenomenological turn." We must suspend
judgment
concerning the world. Under that suspension we are aware only of the set of ordered perceptions
derived from our experience in the world. What was indubitable for Husserl was the
transcendental I, the I that has these perceptions because it is the ground for all phenomenological
judgments. Under the "Phenomenological" point of view, then scientific cognition in the sense
we have been discussing, can be gained, but only through a study of consciousness, and of the
ways in which data is given to consciousness.
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What it means, that objectivity is, and manifests itself cognitively as so being, must
precisely become evident purely from consciousness itself, and thereby it must become
completely understandable. And for that is required a study of consciousness in its
entirety, since according to all its forms it enters into positive cognitive functions. To the
extent, however, that consciousness is "consciousness-of," the essential study of
consciousness includes also that of consciousness-meaning and consciousness-objectivity
as such. To study any kind of objectivity whatever according to its general essence (a
study that can pursue interests far removed from those of knowledge theory and the
investigation of consciousness) means to concern oneself with objectivities modes of
givenness and to exhaust its essential content in the process of "clarification" proper to it.
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By the act of suspending judgment concerning the existence of an objective world outside of
consciousness, and examining only the contents of consciousness, we can eliminate all of the
problems of transcendental existence that have plagued philosophy since Hume and Kant. But we
must include in that examination the intent and meaning given to the contents of consciousness by
the transcendental ego. Husserl spent his life applying the Phenomenological turn to problems in
science and philosophy. But what we are interested in here is his role in the development of
existentialism, or the philosophy of existence. When Husserl retired his place was taken by
Martin Heidegger.
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