Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

by Edmund Husserl

Book Overview

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism.

Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, The genuine spiritual struggles...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081010458X
• ISBN13: 9780810104587
• Release Date: June 1970
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 405 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

shaking science at the roots

I have read husserl's the crisis and enjoyed it very much. I think that this book has lost none of it's relevance. It is a thorough analysis of what science can and cannot do. For me as a landscape architecture teacher this books delivers a good antidote against all too positivistic scientific thinking within the university. It opens our eyes to the fact that science can answer certain questions very well but at a loss of meaning and sense. It peals off the layers of history that hide the shaky foundations of science and reveals the scope of science and that much is beyond this scope. It is meticulous in it's analysis, but in that it is thorough and not shallow. I can advice all who are interested in the relation between science and the world to carefully study this book.The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (SPEP)The World of Perception

Be looking for the emotional outcries!

Edmund Husserl's "The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology" resonates well. The following are my impressions and reflections after reading this very interesting book. Every object-subject composite (relation) is a "phenomenon", and Husserl begins his phenomenology from Descartes' doubt that cannot be doubted. Husserl notes that the phenomenon is open to exploration. We explore so we can discover what is pregiven, so we can find our preconditions. Husserl reminds us that Kant was sterred from his slumber by Hume's skepticism. Kant's "appearance" is embedded in a space-time manifold, and as such it represents a phenomenon that hides the "thing-in-itself". The phenomenon is a composite uniting the provisional with the universal, and Kant had to feel it to be so reactive once Hume and Leibniz made their points known. Husserl reminds us to look beyond the ego-soul of Descartes, and to look beyond the dualism where Kant got stuck. Every feeling is such a composite, so every feeling is also a phenomenon. Every feeling holds the slightest spark of awareness. I might add that every law of nature given by an equation is experiential in the sense that the law is first conceived in the mind, and then later is it empirically verified. Therefore, the law as an equation is abstraction that forgets the experiential. Because natural laws are experiential they involve feelings, and therefore these laws are phenomenological too. It is not surprising that Husserl is very critical of objective philosophy and positive science that has lost track of the subjective ingredients that come with all phenomenon. Husserl tells us that meaning may become lost in history, and meaning relates to the preconditions of history which has to do with the geometrical horizons that history grows into. Husserl (page 49) is translated to write: "The geometry of idealities was preceded by the practical art of surveying, which knew nothing of idealities. Yet such a pregeometrical achievement was a meaning-fundament for geometry, a fundament for the great invention of idealization; the latter encompassed the invention of the ideal world of geometry, or rather the methodology of the objectifying determinations of idealities through the construction which create `mathematical existence.'" Science grew out of traditions, and geometry is no less a tradition. The pregivens are found sleeping, Husserl tells us that the pregivens are taken for granted. Husserl (page 69) writes: "Only a radical inquiry back into subjectivity - and specifically the subjectivity which ultimately brings about all world-validity, with its content and in all its prescientific and scientific modes, and into the `what' and the `how' of the rational accomplishments - can make objective truth comprehensible and arrive at the ultimate ontic meaning of the world." In Husserl day (right before World War II) positivist science and existential philosophy lost their meaning (I add that the meaning i

The Return to Things Themselves

Husserl is a tremendous apologist of "philosophy as rigorous science." This volume ("The Crisis") serves as the philosopher's clearest and most distinct exposition of the problems that beset modern Civilization and that still prevent many of us from appreciating an understanding of reality unmediated by empiricist and historicist biases. Most succinctly, Husserl has shown how and why it is possible for practical judgment to remain unbiased, and for theoretical/pure reason to remain in touch with life. Husserl has helped later generations re-discover a rational/classical alternative to both modern reason and modern irrationalism. With Husserl, the critique of modernity points to a reason above "the machine." That is why Husserl rejected the anti-rationalist disposition displayed by his brilliant student, Martin Heidegger, whose inconclusive turn to pre-Socratic Wisdom arguably suffered from an inadequate understanding of the Socratic/"mediating/moderating" Quest for wisdom. With Husserl, two options were disclosed to public attention: 1) a "new [atheistic, nihilistic] thinking" finding its core representation in Heideggerian "Existentialism"; 2) Classical (pre-Cartesian, non-Machiavellian) Rationalism, or "rational life" not subject to the Cartesian tendency to decay into the historicization and mechanization of reason/philosophy. Most scholars today have found a way to dilute "Existentialism" to a degree that makes it possible to place "Existentialism" at the service of the powers that be (conformism). Among the very few who prefer to seek out a classical, non-historicist understanding of reason and history, we find two of Husserl's students--Jacob Klein and Leo Strauss. The first helped expose the essential link between Husserl's teachings and classical Socratic/Platonic philosophy; the second, inaugurated an exceptional return OF classical political rationalism--of a School of Philosophy, in the Platonic sense--at a time when the "temple" of science (the Academy) had become a sea of suspicion-breeding sophisticated ideologies. It need not surprise the disinterested bystander that Strauss has henceforth become target of many an ideological reprisal. What is perhaps most "disturbing" about Strauss is that he makes it extremely difficult to critique rationalists such as Husserl for their (unremarkable?) inadequacies. That is because with Strauss such a critique presupposes access to a degree of speculative reason that is higher, and NOT lower, than the one exemplified by Husserl: one must understand an author as well as he understood himself, BEFORE claiming to understand him "better."

Husserl's last introduction

It is somewhat ironic that Phenomenology, as a term or as a philosophical school, has yet to really reach the popular consciousness, given that phenomenology is in many respects a study of consciousness and how reality impacts consciousness. Phenomenology in the most formal sense of being a school of philosophy is largely traced to Franz Brentano (1838-1917) and Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Husserl's great work at the turn of the last century, Logical Investigations, set the stage for the development of phenomenology as a way of seeing, a descriptive study with roots in empiricism going back to inspiration from Aristotelian ideas. This is a key word - description. Rather than being a set of constructs and principles typical of previous philosophical systems, Phenomenology attempts to describe reality fully as reality is presented to our senses. Phenomenology is different from scientific study in that it does not pretend toward a universal truth or experience unmediated through our subjectivity (a principle modern science seems to be incorporating more and more). Editor Dermot Moran has a solid introduction to the subject, including distinctions of different kinds of study, some of the personalities involved in the development of phenomenology, and the current state of the discipline. This book by Husserl is one written late in his career. The Nazi party was well on its way to taking complete power in Germany, and other forces of despair were very present in the Western culture. Husserl's protege Heidegger had gone from phenomenology to existentialism, a philosophical framework that Husserl distrusted, but understood as completely in keeping with the overall crisis of meaning and purpose that he saw taking root in society at its very core. Husserl's work from 1900 forward was always involved in recasting and adapting phenomenology to the current culture; each of his books in that time had as a title or subtitle 'An Introduction to Phenomenology', and this particular text was no different. Often overlooked in this text's presentation is that it was actually unfinished at Husserl's death, and had once again taken phenomenology in new directions. Perhaps the most radical departure of this version of phenomenology to Husserl's earlier constructs is the incorporation of psychological ideas. Husserl's concern is to overcome the lack of meaning found in science and technology, the lack of telos and the lack of an inherent moral structure. Husserl traces the history of ideas and search for meaning in intellectual enterprise, and ends with a sense of a 'life-world' that draws closer to the aims of existentialism than he had ever done before. This is a fascinating text.

. . . the Spirit alone is immortal.

Written at the end of his career and on the eve of the Holocaust, the Crisis stands, I believe, as one of the greatest one volume educations in print today. Unlike his more "technical" works which rigorously deal with phenomenology in itself, the Crisis is more of a look at the need for phenomenology and phenomenological psychology in modern humanity's life. Looking at the history of science and philosophy, Husserl traces the development and "success" of scientism and materialism. In doing so phenomenologically, Husserl makes a very strong case for the need of phenomenology in order to overcome the lifelessness of materialism and inaugurate a "heroism of reason" and humanism. Anyone interested in philosophy, science, sociology, civil rights, etc. I urge to read this book actively and critically. For non-specialists and people who aren't "scholars" of any kind or degree may find the language a bit dense or heavy at times, but ! . . . it's good for you. The volume also features appendices which include the classic Vienna Lecture as well as other essays and lectures. The Crisis is a classic and brilliant look into science, philosophy and society which, unlike a lot of theory today, offers a cohesive system grounded in humanism, to wit, Husserlian phenomenology. Please read this book.