Jacob Klein's Revisionof Husserl's Crisis

Abstract

The stated intention of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, especially as it gained increasing clarity in his late work, was to cure the "crisis of the European sciences" which was, or is, also the "crisis of European humanity." This intention must be limited by the historical and critical analyses that attempt to substantiate it to the same degree that these analyses themselves must be renewed and extended to measure up to the intention. Only such a mutual interrogation can decide whether the healing intention of phenomenology should be revised, extended or abandoned. The revision by Jacob Klein of the role of mathematics in the institution (Urstiftung) of modern science as described by Husserl is one major site for such mutual interrogation. Klein's revision is based on his account of "symbol-generating abstraction" that he traces to the reformulation of modern mathematics by Vieta and others.1 My concern in this essay is to follow out the implications of Klein's revision of Husserl for the problem of reification in social reality and the human sciences. Husserl's critique of modernity in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology centers on the "mathematization of nature" whereby nature is interpreted as in reality mathematical and thus amenable to a form of knowledge that is fundamentally mathematical. On this basis, modern knowledge accomplishes a "mathematical substruction of the world" in which the world as a totality is understood as being fundamentally mathematical and all qualitative features are understood to be secondary effects rooted in human subjectivity. In order to understand the constitution of modernity it is necessary to understand the original formation and perdurance of the structures that pre-form subsequent experiences. Here phenomenology encounters the question of history, not simply as empirical history, but as transcendental history. It is in the context of clarifying the sense in which Galileo established the new science that Husserl introduced the term Urstiftungwhich can be translated as "primal establishment," but better as "institution."2 It is mainly a temporal structure in the sense in which it is different to be born after the introduction of compulsory public schooling than before it, but it contains a spatial dimension in the sense that such an introduction begins in some places before others whose "uneven development" then exerts an interactive "push and pull" between them.3 Transcendental history is concerned with the temporal inscription of the life-world such that subsequent empirical history takes a different form after rather than before its institution. The process of institution may be drawn out in empirical history but from the viewpoint of transcendental history it constitutes one historical event. During this event of institution, its full implications and consequences are not yet evident. Similarly, certain elements enter into the institution whose origin is simply passed over and whose validity is simply taken for granted due to its prior sedimentation in tradition. Thus, more is given in the instituting event than is visible at the time. An event in transcendental history will thus often take considerable empirical history for its institution to become a question worth investigation, let alone be completely clarified. Such was the case for the mathematization of nature by Galileo that Husserl began to investigate within transcendental history due to the problem that the contemporary crisis of the sciences posed for the relation of science and philosophy to human life.4 Immediately prior to his analysis of the mathematization of nature in Crisis, Husserl observed that the reshaping of philosophy at the beginning of the modern age was based upon the "immense change of meaning whereby universal tasks were set, primarily for mathematics (as geometry and as formalabstract theory of numbers and magnitudes)."5 Thus, it is not only the interpretation of nature in mathematical terms, nor this combined with the ontologization toward a mathematical world-which arguably was already present in Plato-but that this combination is based upon a different mathematics unavailable to the Greek or Medieval worlds. …