Muslim Selbstverständnis: Ahmet Davutoğlu Answers Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences

Abstract

In a lecture he delivered in Vienna in May 1935 (Biemel 1962) the German philosopher Edmund Husserl identified a crisis in the West (which he defined as Europe, Britain and the US). More precisely he found multiple crises, which he termed the crises of the European sciences ( krises de europaisichen Wissenschaften). The content of the Vienna lecture reveals a crisis that was precipitated by the European sciences and that afflicted all of European humanity (Europaischen Menschheit). Husserl traced the origins of this crisis of humanity to the work of the Italian physicist and founding theorist of science Galileo Galilei. Galileo's conception of the universe as a closed, logical, and mechanical system was, Husserl believed, the force behind the empirical, positivistic excesses of modern science which wrought the crisis. He also blamed the Renaissance which, like Galileo, had unduly elevated humanity and exaggerated the powers of the human mind. No opponent of rationalism, Husserl objected to the fact that in the West, rationalism had been rendered superficial, in its entanglement in 'naturalism' and 'objectivism' (Carr 1970: 299). European humanity was alienated from itself. It had grown distant from that which had made it special and admirable: its role as a philosophical and a critical agent exploring not only the capacity but also the limitations of reason and rationality.Ahmet Davutoglu, a Muslim, Turkish academic turned government adviser and (since 2009) the Foreign Minister of the Turkish Republic, answers Husserl's European crisis with his doctoral dissertation, published in 1994 as Alternative Paradigms: The Impact of Islamic and Western Weltanschauungs on Political Theory. In this work Davutoglu agrees with Husserl's diagnosis of the West. Davutoglu accepted Husserl's diagnosis of the aetiology and symptoms of the European crisis. His prescription, however, was one that Husserl did not consider: Islamic civilisation (Islam medeniyeti). Treating the Western worldview as a fatally-flawed foil, Davutoglu reads the history of Islamic traditions as the only available cure to the ailments of Western civilisation. Whilst an assertion such as this is a certain recipe for civilisational competition and conflict, the purpose of bringing Husserl and Davutoglu into dialogue is rather to explore a tendency common to the intellectual workings of each figure: the phenomenological impulse.It is evident as a matter of historical fact that Husserl was not a Muslim and that his philosophical ideas did not originate in Islam. Whatever his religious identity Husserl did conceive and practise a philosophical school he explicitly termed phenomenology; a philosophy of consciousness that eschewed pretensions to unmediated, objective truths and claims about a mind-independent world, external to consciousness. Whether Davutoglu subscribed to Husserl's phenomenology and discovered the same transcendental impulses independently evolved in his own religious faith is unclear; the question is secondary. This article explores instead the question whether Islam - as interpreted and adumbrated by Ahmet Davutoglu - is itself an earlier, and continuing, latent instance of phenomenology.From Umwelt to LebensweltAlthough Husserl emphasised in his lecture that he did not intend reference to the West to be understood in geographic terms, it is apparent that he considered Greece in the sixth and seventh centuries BCE to be its birthplace. The philosopher Plato extracted (Western) humanity from the Umwelt. This term of Husserlian art, the Umwelt is the pre-theoretical world in which naivete rules, perceptions are immediate, and reality is neither more nor less than it seems. For the philosophers at least Plato inaugurated the search for things as they really are, appearances notwithstanding; the world was not what it seemed, and sensory perceptions are even yet neither accurate nor sufficient guides to truth. As Husserl describes Plato's discoveries: because reality is something other than is immediately apparent, Representations (Weltvorstellung) become necessary - representations of true reality which is not accessible through the sensible organs of perception (Carr 1970: 293). …