Philosophy's Nature: Husserl's Phenomenology, Natural Science, and Metaphysics

Husserl's Phenomenology, Natural Science, and Metaphysics

Emiliano Trizio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000206739
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Phénoménologie en philosophie

This book offers a systematic interpretation of the relation between natural science and metaphysics in Husserl's phenomenology. It shows that Husserl's account of scientific knowledge is a radical alternative to established methods and frameworks in contemporary philosophy of science.

The author's interpretation of Husserl's philosophy offers a critical reconstruction of the historical context from which his phenomenological approach developed, as well as new interpretations of key Husserlian concepts such as metaphysics, idealization, life-world, objectivism, crisis of the sciences, and historicity. The development of Husserl's philosophical project is marked by the tension between natural science and transcendental phenomenology. While natural science provides a paradigmatic case of the way in which transcendental phenomenology, ontology, empirical science, and metaphysics can be articulated, it has also been the object of philosophical misunderstandings that have determined the current cultural and philosophical crisis. This book demonstrates the ways in which Husserl shows that our conceptions of philosophy and of nature are inseparable.

Philosophy's Nature will appeal to scholars and advanced students who are interested in Husserl and the relations between phenomenology, natural science, and metaphysics.

1The Relation Between Physical Theory and Reality

Historical and Conceptual Material

§1. The Problem of the Object of Physical Theory at the Time of the Decline of the Classical Mechanistic Worldview

The three decades preceding the end of the 19th century was a time of great scientific upheavals marked by the demise of the mechanistic worldview. If we tend to underestimate its significance, this is largely because of the shadow that the subsequent appearance of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity has cast over it. It was also a time that saw the emergence of a vast epistemological debate about the very essence of the mathematical science of nature, which was destined to continue along similar lines well into the 20th century. The title of Pierre Duhem’s famous 1906 book, La théorie physique – son object sa structure, perfectly captures the main point at issue in this debate. What meaningful task can be assigned to physical theory from the point of view of logic and the theory of knowledge? In other words, what is its real object? What is physical theory ultimately about? Furthermore, with what conceptual material is a physical theory to be built? What unity must pertain to such material? In short, what is the structure of physical theory? Ernst Cassirer, at the beginning of a detailed reconstruction of some of the predominant epistemological currents of the time, stresses the exceptional character of this controversy:

In no earlier period do we meet such extensive argument over the very conception of physics, and in none is the debate so acrimonious. Even classical physics did not have this conception ready at hand; on the contrary, one of its first tasks had been to create the concept and then to defend it in constant battle with the Aristotelian-scholastic view. But this conflict was waged on a compact and united front in the conviction that reason and experience would be able to penetrate the nature of reality and progressively reveal it. The ontological significance of the physical theories was never seriously challenged, however widely these differed from each other in content.

In the nineteenth century, however, there came a sudden change. The realism of natural science was supplanted by a phenomenalism that disputed not only the possible existence of a solution but even the meaning of the problems that had been set up by physical thought. When Mach or Planck, Boltzmann or Ostwald, Poincaré or Duhem are asked what a physical theory is and what it can accomplish we receive not only different but contradictory answers, and it is clear that we are witnessing more than a change in the purpose and intent of the investigation.¹

The authors mentioned by Cassirer were nothing like today’s professional philosophers of science, for they were all practicing scientists who made important contributions to their fields. As we shall see, in their work the epistemological and ontological reflections on science accompany specific choices in the elaboration and formulation of scientific theories and, thus, are by no means methodologically neutral. Every reconstruction of this debate must begin by recalling that the main coordinates of the “realism” Cassirer refers to point to the task assigned to physical theory between the end of the 18th and the first half of the 19th century. It was the time of the triumphant mechanistic, Newtonian worldview, heralded by Pierre-Simon Laplace’s famous mental experiment.² As for the “phenomenalism” that Cassirer opposes to realism, we will soon have the opportunity to discuss it at length. Laplace’s mechanistic and deterministic worldview, which he deemed to follow from the spectacular predictive success of Newtonian astronomy, epitomizes the philosophy underlying most mathematical science of the time, which was being analytically formulated in the works of Joseph-Louis Lagrange. According to Laplace, the difference between the behavior of planets and comets and that of the atoms and molecules making up material objects lies only in our ignorance concerning the latter.³ Only our limited capacity to determine the physical variables involved in such complex systems prevents us from obtaining the same kind of predictive power enjoyed by astronomy. In sum, a material object is but an extremely complex system of atoms and molecules that evolves according to the differential equations governing Newtonian, or central, forces. Thus, in principle, one single formula, a “world formula,” could comprise past, present, and future states of the entire universe. Such a conception completely predetermined the task of physical theory in a thoroughly realistic way. In order to understand the inner structure of all phenomena, whether magnetic, electrical, optical, thermic, or even chemical, one had, in principle, to aim at an explanation in mechanical terms. Understandably, this research program exerted a powerful influence across all the special sciences as well as metaphysics, and it lead to a vast materialistic movement in philosophy and to a likewise vast debate over materialism of dubious philosophical value.⁴ Nevertheless, the debates over the intrinsic limitations of the mechanical worldview, and its demise within scientific research itself, deserve our attention in view of the characterization of the controversy concerning the ontological significance of physical theory.

§2. The Problem of the Limits of Physical Knowledge: Du Bois-Reymond

The locus classicus of the debate about the intrinsic limitations of traditional mechanism is the famous lecture that the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond delivered at the 45th conference of the German natural scientists and doctors, which took place in Leipzig in 1872: Über die Grenze des Naturerkennens. Nothing illustrates Du Bois-Reymond’s faith in the universal validity of mechanical explanations based on the notions of atom and force better than the fact that devising such explanations for all changes taking place in the world of physical bodies amounts, for him, to the very definition of physical knowledge. In other words, according to him, understanding the material world (including the material side of all forms of life) means devising explanations in terms of movements of atoms interacting through central forces.⁵ In this lecture, such an admittedly dogmatic characterization of physical knowledge is introduced in order to highlight its intrinsic limitations. To illustrate them, Du Bois-Reymond resorts to a kind of negative version of Laplace’s thought experiment: if the latter expresses the ideal of a fully developed, infinitely remote, and complete physical science, what would remain inaccessible to Laplace’s hypothetical “spirit” would also lie forever beyond the reach of human knowledge. In this lecture, the limits of physical knowledge amount to the following. First, no physical theory can enable us to know the essence of matter and force; that is, the essence of the material world is beyond our reach. Second, even an ideally complete physical knowledge (or, as Du Bois-Reymond says, an “astronomical knowledge”⁶) of the nervous system would never yield an explanation of why mental life arises out of it, not even in the case of the simplest sensation occurring in a primitive life form.⁷ The justification of these claims requires a brief discussion.

To start with, one should not miss the radicalism of the first claim, which according to Du Bois-Reymond implies that the knowledge of nature afforded by mechanics satisfies our demand for causal explanation only provisionally and that, at bottom, it is no knowledge at all.⁸ Du Bois-Reymond’s argument rests on the distinction between “physical” and “philosophical” atoms.⁹ By the former, he means a body whose size is negligible with respect to ordinary bodies, but is, in spite of its name, still divisible. To such atoms, natural scientists ascribe states of movement and other mechanical properties so that a large number of them explain the observable behavior of macroscopic bodies. However, according to Du Bois-Reymond, atoms thus understood are only fictions, the usefulness of which varies according to the specific field of investigation.¹⁰ Du Bois-Reymond does not explicitly say why they are only fictions. Presumably, the reason is that they are not even meant to be the ultimate components of reality, but only conceptual units allowing a certain convenient, and by no means uniquely determined, decomposition of observable objects. Furthermore, their divisibility hints at the fact that they are but “very small pieces” of macroscopic bodies, and accepting their explanatory function does not commit the scientist to any conception of the essence of matter, not even to a choice between the corpuscularist and the continuist ones. The “philosophical atom,” on the other hand, is “an allegedly indivisible mass of an inert and ineffective substrate, from which forces acting at a distance through the empty space emanate.”¹¹ This atom, however, is an “Unding,” an absurd non-entity, and the attempts to develop a clear conception of it lead to the contradictions of classical corpuscularist philosophy. If an atom occupies a tiny portion of space, why is it not further divisible? If it is infinitely hard, so that it can fill up space, and thus it reacts to any force trying to compress it, how can it be an effect-less substrate? Moreover, if it has no extension at all, if the substrate is identified with the middle point of central forces, how can it fill up space? And what is left as the source of the central forces?¹² Other well-known problems affect the notion of a force acting at a distance through empty space already discussed by Leibniz.¹³ In sum, because physical explanation rests on concepts (atom and force) that either stand for useful fictions or vaguely designate contradictory philosophical concepts, it is not apt to provide a satisfactory picture of the essence of matter. Du Bois-Reymond also provides an account of the sources of these unavoidable contradictions:

They are rooted in our inability to represent anything other than something experienced either with the external senses or with the internal sense. In the effort to fragment the corporeal world, we start from the divisibility of matter, because, visibly, parts are something simpler and more fundamental than the whole. If we proceed in thought further and further with the division of matter, we remain in the intuition on the path allowed to us, and we feel unhindered in our thinking. We take no step towards the understanding of the material object [Ding], because, in fact, we represent in the realm of the small and invisible only what appears in the realm of the large and visible. We arrive, thus, at the concept of the physical atom. But if now, anywhere, we arbitrarily halt the division, we stop at alleged philosophical atoms that should be indivisible any further, perfectly hard, and yet in themselves effect-less, and only bearing central forces: thus, we require that a matter, which we conceive by means of the image of matter as we manipulate it, unfolds new, fundamental properties explaining its own essence, and this without introducing any new principle. Thus, we make the mistake that manifests itself through the previously exposed contradictions.¹⁴

In light of this p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction and Plan of the Work
• 1 The Relation Between Physical Theory and Reality: Historical and Conceptual Material
• 2 Husserl’s Conception of Natural Science Between the Theory of Knowledge and Metaphysics
• 3 Transcendental Consciousness and Nature
• 4 The Transcendental Constitution of Material Nature
• 5 Life-World, Natural Science, and the Crisis of Philosophy
• Conclusion
• Index