Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences

This chapter provides a critical overview of Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences project, first published in part in 1936, then posthumously as Husserliana, Volume VI, edited by Walter Biemel (Husserl 1954; Husserl 1970 ). Part One opens with an analysis of the meaning of the modern revolution in the natural sciences (exemplified by Galileo), with its “mathematization of nature” involving the idealization of space and application of the new concept of infinity ( Crisis , §9). Part Two analyzes the opposition between objectivity and subjectivity as it emerged in modern science and in modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Part Three A discusses the pre-given, always taken-for-granted “lifeworld,” which had never before become a topic of inquiry, even for Kant. Husserl’s renewal of the task of transcendental philosophy involves a radicalization of Kant’s project to take in to account the working of anonymous “functioning subjectivity” ( fungierende Subjektität , Husserl 1954 , 416, 522). Husserl then addresses the great paradox of transcendental philosophy, namely that humans are both natural objects that appear within the world and also “subjects for the world.” In Part Three B, Husserl examines the problematic status of psychology as a science and claims that it needs to be given a grounding in transcendental phenomenology. This chapter will explore Husserl’s critique of the modern mathematical scientific viewpoint, his defense of transcendental phenomenology, and his exploration of the lifeworld.