It was not always the case that science understood its demand for rigorously grounded truth in the sense of that sort of objectivity which dominates our positive sciences in respect to method and which, having its effect far beyond the sciences themselves, is the basis for the support and widespread acceptance of a philosophical and ideological positivism. The specifically human questions were not always banned from the realm of science: their intrinsic relationship to all the sciences—even to those of which man is not the subject matter, such as the natural sciences—was not left unconsidered. As long as this had not yet happened, science could claim significance—indeed, as we know, the major role—in the completely new shaping of European humanity which began with the Renaissance. Why science lost this leadership, why there occurred an essential change, a positivistic restriction of the idea of science—to understand this according to its deeper motives, is of great importance for the purpose of these lectures. ³

For all its successes in the material sphere, how is it that science has so little to say of human-spiritual existence?

The success of the scientific attitude had been based on the exactness of its sciences, going beyond the merely intuitive and limited empirical procedure that characterized pre-modern Aristotelian science to reach a kind of exactness that is a true unity, “a true revolution in the technical control of nature.”⁴But this exactness is not to be confused with positivist reductionist objectivization, which is but a misunderstanding of science as a derailment of the ideal of a humanistic science. Positivism attains an inauthentic worldless exactness where all things are to be seen as mere objects and therefore, as objects, can now be subjected to “systematic approximations, in terms of its unconditionally universal elements and laws.” We must pay close attention: this is where Husserl comes in, with the reassertion of the world of universal elements and laws, which are universal but only because of their rootedness in lebenswelt-worldhood. This is the strange uniqueness and integrity of his idealism. The misguided rationalism of the earlier rationalists, holding up the merit of its “scientific” success, has not gone far enough; it has left out the world. More precisely, positivism has missed the very point of science, it has left out the transcendental character of the “I,” and this is the key to Husserl’s unique idealism (and yet, as we shall see, the paradoxical result of his doctrine of intentionality). The scientific attitude of the earlier rationalists led to a kind of positivism not concerned with the broader questions of philosophy; narrowing its scope away from the arduousness of philosophy has been its superficial success. The reductionist objectivization of the world allows for “clear and distinct” but nevertheless uncritical knowledge, and therefore of no bearing on the origin of knowledge in a universal science. Husserl never wavers, that when it comes to man we are in the treatment of a different kind of being. The knowledge of nature can be scientifically “objective” only insofar as the methods and the questions are positivistic, but the humanistic disciplines must frame their questions differently, in such a way that they account for the intimate human subjectivity which escapes reduction to measurable facticities.⁵Husserl’s criticism of the humanistic sciences (specifically psychology), and the reason for their failure when compared to the other sciences, is precisely their postivistic approach. The failure of the humanistic sciences is that they ape the rules of natural science in their endeavors. Rather should they lead. This failure of scientific reason to understand itself is what led to the nineteenth-century philosophic dualistic impasse between equally naive materialist realisms and subjectivist idealisms, and from there to the twentieth-century crisis of alienation and therefore to the crisis of European man:

Blinded by naturalism (no matter how much they attack it verbally) the humanists have totally failed even to pose the problem of a universal and pure humanistic science and to inquire after a theory of the essence of spirit purely as spirit which would pursue what is unconditionally universal, by way of elements and laws in the spiritual sphere with the purpose of proceeding from there to scientific explanations in an absolutely final sense. ⁶

For Husserl the “surrounding world . . . the locus of our cares and endeavors” is where we come to knowledge of ourselves by stepping outside the self-centric natural world of custom and into the free world of the spiritual sphere. The man who understands spirit as spirit need not ask for any other explanation but a spiritual explanation. When the “surrounding world,” the spiritual structure of our present and historical life, is illegitimately weighed down by a naturalistic interpretation, by artificial and inappropriately applied exactitudes, we have leapt into the realm of absurdity and alienation, and are only one step away from barbarity. This absurdity makes the very spiritual nature of the surrounding world alien to its own spirit, and with this alienation comes the crisis of European man. Husserl deftly understands that the error of the human sciences was to disjoin the central thrust of human life, its unity of spirit, from man. The forgottenness of man, the loss of his natural spiritual entelechy, happened when man as a historical being attempted to explain his spiritual occurrence in a “natural-scientific way”: this very forgottenness has given rise to and continually spreads the crisis of European science as the crisis of European man. Until our entelechy is redirected to the realm of the spirit, man’s barbarity will thrive in a naturalistically closed society run astray from its potentiality to be brought up into the true scientific attitude of a genuinely open society. “Blinded by naturalism,” this illegitimately closed society has locked its door to the real surrounding world of spirit into which it must enter to be fully human as a community of human knowing. In other words, natural science as it has developed historically and teleologically has never truly transcended the closed society; it has instead lived within it while subverting it, reducing and ridiculing while never elevating its traditions and myths.

The door to the meaning of the lived world has been locked: Is it possible for it to be reopened? Can we overcome this crisis of science, as the crisis of European man, and regain the infinite possibilities and intentional infinities within the consciousness of our surrounding world? In other words, can we fully enter the open society? How must we rectify the crisis of European man? The scientist, who broadens his scope, refusing positivistic reductionist objectivization, has begun to enter the open society, but the scientist must be a philosopher to gain full access; the scientist must ask the genuine questions of human existence, relearn his Greek heritage and therefore ask the questions of human existence in a way that befits human existence. Humans are not objects separated into categorically positivistic divisions; for science to be science, to be really real, it must reach beyond the realm of factic assertion and rejoin its origin as a universal science. This European unification of man or “European supranationality aims at an infinitely distant normative shape, but not one that could simply be read off the changing succession of shapes by a morphological observation from the outside. The constant directedness towards a norm inhabits the intentional life of individual persons, and thence the nations with their particular social units, and finally the organism of nations bound together as Europe.”⁷This single nation is not built upon factic assertion but upon a transformation of humanity, “a new sort of humanity, one which living in finitude, lives towards poles of infinity.”⁸

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The questions now are whether Husserl has properly diagnosed the crisis and whether his proposed therapy is curative. For all his sincere talk of the Greek ideal, it is Spirit qua Spirit and not Being qua Being that is his concern. Is this a distinction without a difference or does it beg the question that he is participating in a great and vast idealism whose attempt to regain the world is doomed at the start? At Being’s core is mystery, at least insofar as we are completely dependent on Being for our knowledge of it. It is this total mysterious dependence that frustrates all rationalisms and idealisms. Our radical dependency led someone like Aquinas to an understanding of Being as something other than the “I,” encountered only in the world; that this other participates, without reduction, with the “I,” in a kind of mutual transcendence. The world of Being, the world of otherness, for Aquinas is necessary for knowledge: so much so that even self-knowledge requires the world. In a way mysterious and profound, the human intellect by its own being comes to be the known thing. And yet if this is the starting point for Husserl as well, a start within the world, how can an Aristotelian intentionality as such end in idealism? The question of the possibility of beginning in intentionality and ending in idealism may shed light on Husserl’s embrace of the Renaissance ideal and his need to envision philosophy as universal science.