The Phenomenological Project of Desedimenting the Formalization of Meaning: Jacob Klein's Contribution

Abstract

JACOB KLEIN'S CONTRIBUTION (ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes formulae omitted.) (ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology as First Philosophy has but one goal: intuitive knowledge of what is. On his view, both what in the world the formalized meaning formations of mathematical physics refer to and therefore make intuitable, and how in the world this reference and corresponding intuition is possible, is obscure. He traces this obscurity to the fact that the formalized meaning at issue in modern mathematics is made possible by the progressive "emptying of its meaning in relation" (Crisis, 44/44)1 to the "real [real]" (35/37), that is, to the intuitive givenness of the things manifest to everyday sense experience in the surrounding world. Husserl's historical reflection on the beginnings of the development of modern, Galilean science, reveals that it is first made possible by this progressive emptying of meaning. That is, the meaning formations of the mathematics that make physics possible are themselves made possible by their "becoming liberated from all intuited actuality, about numbers, numerical relations" (43/44), and of course from the intuitively given shapes of actual things. More precisely, the ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry are substituted for the intuited shapes of things, while algebraic calculation with "'symbolic' concepts" (48/48) that express numbers in general-as opposed to determined numbers-excludes the "Original thinking that genuinely gives meaning to this technical process and truth to the correct results" (46/46). To be sure, Husserl's investigations in the Crisis-texts of the emptying of meaning that makes modern physics possible are fragmentary. Their focus is on the origin of geometry and on what he refers to as the "sedi-mentation" (52/52) involved in the Galilean impulse to treat Euclidean geometry in a taken-for-granted, and therefore straightforward, manner. Husserl uses the term "sedimentation" to designate the "constant presuppositions . . . [of the] constructions, concepts, presuppositions, theories" that characterize the significations of the meaning formations of a science-in the case at hand, of Galilean natural science-insofar as they are not '"cashed in' [einzulosenden]"2 (OG, 376/366), that is, reactivated in terms of the original activities that produced their meaning. Cashing in the meaning formations in question requires that we eventually reactivate the "historical beginning" (367/356) that this science "must have had," which in the case of Galilean natural science means that we eventually have to reactivate the origin of the Euclidean geometry that was taken for granted when its meaning formations were first established. Husserl's fragmentary analyses of the "origin of the modern spirit " (Crisis, 58/57), in which he links to Galileo's name "all of our characterizations . . . in a certain sense simplifying and idealizing the matter," therefore function in effect to "de-sediment" the meaning formations accomplished by this spirit and thereby to reactivate their historical beginnings. Specifically, Husserl's de-sedimentation of these meaning formations cashes in both the direct and the indirect impulse of the Galilean spirit to mathematize the world by tracing this accomplishment back to its origin in "the sphere of immediately experiencing intuitions and the possible experience of the prescientific life-world" (42/43). It seems clear that Husserl's access to the latter is me-diated by the historical backward reference that issues from what he encounters as the obscure or unintelligible meaning formations of present-day mathematical natural science, the backward reference he traces in accord with the backward and forward zigzag pattern that characterizes his epistemological-historical method. Thus it is not as if Husserl, sitting in his study, is somehow able to conjure up the direct experience of the prescientific life-world, the primordial experience of which would then provide the basis for a comparison disclosive of the abstract view of the world presumably found in the meaning formations that make up mathematical physics. …