Crisis of European Sciences

Introduction

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (German: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie) is the late masterpiece of Edmund Husserl and the final statement of his phenomenological program. Composed between 1934 and 1937 in the shadow of Nazi Germany and the exclusion of Husserl (as a Jew by ancestry) from German academic life after 1933, the work develops the analysis of the Lebenswelt (life-world) as the pre-theoretical grounding of all theoretical inquiry, and treats the natural sciences as having lost contact with this grounding in ways that produced the crisis of the title.

The work is unusual in the Husserlian corpus for its historical orientation. Where the earlier work had been systematic and descriptive, the Crisis engages the historical roots of European modernity, especially the Galilean revolution in physics, the Cartesian foundation of modern philosophy, and the post-Cartesian development through Locke, Hume, and Kant. The historical reflection is integrated with the systematic phenomenological project; the result is the most accessible and most historically engaged of Husserl's major works.

Composition and publication

The circumstances of composition were substantial. Husserl had been dismissed from his Freiburg professorship in April 1933 under the Nazi racial laws; he was forbidden to publish in German academic venues; the proposed visit to lecture at Oxford in 1937 was prevented when the Nazi authorities refused him a passport. His former student and chosen successor Martin Heidegger, who had succeeded him in the Freiburg chair in 1928, had joined the National Socialist Party in 1933 and conspicuously did not defend Husserl.

The materials of the Crisis developed from a series of lectures Husserl delivered in Prague and Vienna in 1935: the Vienna lecture Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity (May 1935) and the Prague lectures The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology (November 1935). The manuscript of the Crisis itself was composed in 1934–37; Husserl had projected a larger work but completed only the first three parts before his death in 1938.

Parts I and II were published in 1936 in the Belgrade-based journal Philosophia, edited by Arthur Liebert (one of the few European philosophical journals that would still publish German Jewish authors after 1933). Part III remained in manuscript at Husserl's death; the editorial work by Walter Biemel produced the first complete edition (Husserliana VI, 1954). The additional manuscript materials Husserl had been working on were published as supplements in subsequent Husserliana volumes.

The standard English translation by David Carr (Northwestern, 1970) is the dominant English text.

Central doctrines

The crisis

The central thesis is that the natural sciences of European modernity, despite their theoretical and practical successes, have lost contact with their grounding in the life-world of pre-theoretical lived experience. The crisis is not a crisis of scientific results (which continue to be impressive and useful) but a crisis of the meaning of those results for human existence. The sciences produce technical knowledge but fail to address the questions about meaning, value, and the human relation to existence that human beings cannot avoid.

The diagnosis is integrated with the historical narrative. The Galilean mathematization of nature in the seventeenth century produced the framework within which the natural sciences operate; the framework treats nature as a mathematical structure abstracted from the qualitative experience of nature in pre-theoretical life. The abstraction was productive for scientific purposes but produced the loss of contact with the life-world that the Crisis diagnoses.

The life-world

The concept of the Lebenswelt (life-world) gives the systematic articulation of the pre-theoretical world of everyday lived experience that grounds and orients all theoretical inquiry. The life-world is not the physical world as described by physics but the qualitative world of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, textures, the felt presence of other persons, the meanings and values that structure everyday existence.

The life-world is prior to theoretical inquiry in two senses. First, the theoretical inquiry takes its problems from the life-world and returns its results to it; the life-world is the context within which theoretical inquiry has its point. Second, the theoretical inquiry operates within implicit assumptions that derive from the life-world; the scientist uses language, bodily skills, perceptual capacities, and intersubjective practices that come from the life-world.

The recovery of the life-world is the recovery of the grounding that the theoretical sciences had increasingly lost contact with. The recovery is the work of phenomenology in the late Husserlian framework.

Galileo and the mathematization of nature

The historical analysis of the Galilean revolution is one of the most influential portions of the Crisis. Husserl treats the Galilean move as the decisive event in the production of the modern scientific worldview. Galileo treated the qualitative features of nature (substantial colors, sounds, textures) as subjective additions to the primary quantitative features (substantial extension, motion, number); the natural sciences developed within this framework.

The analysis anticipated portions of subsequent twentieth-century philosophy of science. The work of Alexandre Koyré on Galileo and the Scientific Revolution engaged the Husserlian framework directly; the subsequent literature in the history and philosophy of science treats the Crisis as a foundational text.

The Cartesian and post-Cartesian development

The historical analysis extends through the Cartesian foundation of modern philosophy and the post-Cartesian development through Locke, Hume, and Kant. The Cartesian cogito produced the framework within which the relation between consciousness and the world is conceptualized; the post-Cartesian development worked out the consequences. The Kantian transcendental turn gave the framework that Husserl's transcendental phenomenology radicalizes.

The historical narrative is integrated with the systematic project. The Crisis treats the history of modern philosophy as the unfolding of the transcendental phenomenological program in incomplete and confused forms; the Husserlian transcendental phenomenology completes the project the tradition had begun.

Reception

The immediate reception was limited by the political circumstances of publication. The 1936 Philosophia publication reached readers in exile and sympathizers in Eastern Europe but had limited reach within Nazi Germany.

The post-war reception was substantial. The 1954 Husserliana publication made the complete text available; the Carr translation (1970) established the English-language presence. The French phenomenological tradition through Merleau-Ponty (who had access to the unpublished manuscripts during his lifetime) engaged the Crisis directly; Phenomenology of Perception (1945) is in dialogue with the life-world analysis. The Heideggerian tradition engaged the Crisis through the concept of the Lebenswelt, even where it modified or rejected portions of the Husserlian framework.

The twentieth-century engagement through Habermas's development of the Lebenswelt concept in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) is one of the major sociological developments of the framework. The contemporary engagement through phenomenology of medicine (Havi Carel), phenomenology of cognitive science (Hubert Dreyfus, Evan Thompson), and phenomenology of the environment (David Abram, Iain McGilchrist) continues to engage the Crisis.

Place in the wiki

The Crisis of European Sciences is the late masterpiece of Husserl and the systematic articulation of the life-world concept that structures subsequent phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the dialogue between phenomenology and the natural sciences. It is the principal source for the historical orientation of late phenomenology and one of the major texts of twentieth-century continental philosophy.

Further reading

• Husserl — the author
• Phenomenology — the tradition the book shaped
• Logical Investigations — the founding work the Crisis continues and modifies
• Heidegger — the major student whose work developed the tradition
• Being and Time — the major Heideggerian work the Crisis engages

Husserl's late masterpiece composed in the shadow of Nazi Germany. The systematic articulation of the life-world concept and the historical reflection on the philosophical roots of European modernity.