Abstract
Husserl’s Crisis argues that early modern science, exemplified in Galileo, separates the Lifeworld from a world of science by forgetting its origins in bodily perception on the one side, and the practices which found the science on the other. This essay argues that, rather, by overemphasizing mathematization and underemphasizing instruments or technologies which mediate perception, Husserl creates the division he describes. Positively, through the embodied use of instruments science remains thoroughly immersed in the Lifeworld.
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Notes
If “positivism” is tantamount to an absolutely unprejudiced grounding of all sciences on the “positive,” that is to say, on what can be seized upon originaliter, then we are the genuine positivists. In fact, we allow no authority to curtail our right to accept all kinds of intuition as equally valuable legitimating sources of cognition—not even the authority of “modern natural science.” Husserl 1982, p. 39.
“In the intuitively given surrounding world...we experience “bodies”—not geometrical-ideal bodies but precisely those bodies that we actually experience, with the content which is the actual content of experience.” Edmund Husserl 1970), p.25.
I am taking as praxis the activities which constitute various meaning-regions, such as Husserl’s ‘invention’ of Egyptian surveying praxis, “The art of measuring discovers practically the possibility of picking out as [standard] measures certain empirical basic shapes, concretely fixed on empirical rigid bodies which are in fact generally available; and by means of these relations which obtain (or can be discovered) between these and other body-shapes it determines the latter intersubjectively and in practice univocally—at first within narrow spheres (as in the art of surveying land)...The art of measuring thus becomes the trail-blazer for the ultimately universal geometry and its “world” of pure limit-shapes.” Ibid., p. 28.
The geometry which is ready-made, so to speak, from which the regressive inquiry begins, is a tradition. Our human existence moves within innumerable traditions. The whole cultural world, in all its forms, exists through tradition...everything traditional has arisen out of human activity, that accordingly past men and human civilizations existed, and among them their first inventors, who shaped the new of out materials at hand, whether raw or already spiritually shaped. Ibid., pp. 354–5. For a genuine history of philosophy, a genuine history of the particular sciences, is nothing other than the tracing of the historical meaning structures given in the present, or their self-evidences, along the documented chain of historical back-references into the hidden dimension of the primal self-evidences which underlie them. Ibid., p. 372
Making geometry self-evident, then, whether one is clear about this or not, is the disclosure of its historical tradition. Ibid., p 371 The geometry of ediealities was preceded by the practical art of surveying, which knew nothing of idealities. Yet such a pregeometrical achievement was a meaning-fundament for geometry... Ibid., p. 49
Here is again something confusing: every practical world, every science, presupposes the life-world; as purposeful structures they are contrasted with the life-world, which was always and continues to be “of its own accord.” Yet, on the other hand, everything developing and developed by mankind...is itself a piece of the life-world. Ibid., pp. 382–3
But now we must note something of the highest importance that occurred even as early as Galileo: the surreptitious substitution of the mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is every experienced and experienceable—our everyday life-world. Ibid., pp. 48–9
[The confusion of life-world and science as a piece of the life-world, see above]...is only confusing because the scientists, like all who live communalized under a vocational end...have eyes for nothing but their ends and horizons of work. No matter how much the life-world is the world in which they live, to which even all their “theoretical works” belong, and no matter how much they make use of elements of the life-world, which is precisely the “foundation” of theoretical treatment as that which is treated, the life-world is just not their subject matter...and thus [their subject matter] is not, in the full survey, the universe of what is... Ibid., p. 383
...The life-world is the world that is constantly pregiven, valid constantly and in advance as existing, but not valid because of some purpose of investigation, according to some universal end...scientific truth presupposes it...and in the course of [scientific] work it presupposes it every anew, as a world existing in its own way.... Ibid., p. 382
The scientific world...is a purposeful structure extending to infinity—a structure [made by] men who are presupposed, for the presupposed life-world. Ibid., p. 382
But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and to read the alphabet in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth. Galileo 1999, p. 16
I render infinite thanks to God for being so kind as to make me alone the first observer of marvels kept hidden in obscurity for all previous centuries. Galileo in Sobel, op. cite., p. 6
Father Clavius...laughing at Galileo’s pretended four satellites of Jupiter, said he, too, could show them if he were only given time “first to build them into some glasses.” Boorstin, op. cite., p. 316
Husserl, op. cite, pp. 360–1
See a full discussion of this issue in Harold I. Brown 1985
Heidegger: when we use the word “science” today, it means something essentially different from the doctrina and scientia of the Middle Ages, and also from the Greek episteme. Greek science was never exact because in keeping with its essence, it could not be exact and did not need to be exact. Hence it makes no sense whatever to suppose that modern science is more exact than that of antiquity. Neither can we say that the Galilean doctrine of freely falling bodies is true or that Aristotle’s teaching that light bodies strive upward is false; for the Greek understanding of the essence of body and place and the relation between the two rests upon a different interpretation of beings and hence conditions a correspondingly different kind of seeing and questioning of natural events (Heidegger 1997). Kuhn: since remote antiquity most people have seen one or another heavy body swinging back and forth on a string or a chain until it finally comes to rest. To the Aristoteleans, who believed that a heavy body is moved by its own nature from a higher position to a state of natural rest at a lower one, the swinging body was simply falling with difficulty. Galileo, on the other hand, looking at the swinging body, saw a pendulum, a body that almost succeeded in repeating the same motion over and over again ad infinitum...I am acutely aware....of the difficulties created by saying that when Aristotle and Galileo looked at swinging stones, the first saw constrained fall, the second a pendulum... when paradigms change, the world changes with the...paradigm changes...[which] cause scientists to see the world of their research engagement differently. (Kuhn 1962)
References
Boorstin, D. J. (1985). The discoverers. New York: Vintage.
Husserl, E. (1970). In Carr David (Ed.), The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenological philosophy: first book: general introduction to a pure phenomenology translated by F. Kersten (Ed.), Husserliana, Springer.
Galilei, G. (1999). In Sobel Dava (Ed.), Galileo’s daughter. New York: Walker.
Galison, P. (1997). Image and logic: A material culture of microphysics (pp. 787–797). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Brown, H. I. (1985). “Galileo on the Telescope and the Eye, “Journal of the History of Ideas, 45.
Heidegger, M. (1997). Age of the world picture (Science and the quest for reality). New York: New York University Press.
Kuhn, T. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Ihde, D. Husserl’s Galileo Needed a Telescope!. Philos. Technol. 24, 69–82 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-010-0004-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-010-0004-5