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HUSSERVS CRISIS of WESTERN SCIENCE Editor's Preface This Appendix I ALFRED SCHUTZ HUSSERVS CRISIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE Edited by FRED KERSTEN Editor's Preface This letter of Alfred Schutz to Erlc Voegelin was written between 11 November and 13 December, 1943. It contains an extensive reply to a sweeping critique of Husserl's Die Krisis der europl1ischen WlSsenschaften und die transzend­ entale Phllnomenologie1 which his friend Erlc Voegelin had developed in a letter to him. Voegelin had found merit in some of Husserl's lines of thought but on the whole rejected them as much in their references to historlcal trends in European philosophy, which he showed to be arbitrarily selective and hence at variance with historio­ graphical facts and objectivity, as in their philosophical inferlority because they were merely epistemological under­ takings and as such did not reach the level of genuine philosophizing (i.e., they did not constitute a metaphysics). Schutz's defense of Husserl followed two lines of thought: First, that Voegelin misunderstood the whole philosophical intent of Husserl when he considered his interest in past philosophers as serving historiographical interests instead of interest in the problems they had posed; and, second, even if the whole philosophy of Husserl could be subsumed under the heading of epistemology, it would still maintain its high philosophical respectability. At the very end of the letter Schutz spoke of the possibility of continuing this defense of Husserl's way of philosophizing in a further letter. However, no evidence has surfaced to indicate that he found the time to continue his attempt at vindicating Husserl's philosophical dignity. 1 Edmund Husserl, Philosophia, 1936. 277 S. Galt Crowell (ed.), The Prism ofthe Self, 277-287. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. 278 ALFRED SCHUTZ The English translation of the letter is by Helmut Wag­ ner.2 * * * * * Your extensive and important remarks about Husserl's essay labelIed by hirn Krisis der europlIischen WISsenschaften deserve a careful and extensive response. Geographical distance forces us to written exchanges; at least this shall offer us the advantage of putting our ideas into the clearest possible and most orderly form. Initially a personal word may be said about my relationship to the essay of Husserl which is the object of these considerations. I openly confess that I do not face it in a completely objective way. It is particularly close to my heart because during the years in which I was privileged to carry out many a serious dialogue with Husserl I have watched the essay originate and grow, and I was fortunate to leam something about the over-all plan of the fragment. Thus I know that Husserl planned the work to encompass six to eight essays, each of which was to be as long as the one published. He expected it to become the summary and crowning of his philosophical life­ work. So it is understandable that some of Husserl's enthusiasm was trans­ ferred to me. Indeed, it seems to me, as weIl as to you, that many things in this essay belong to the best of what we have inherited from Husserl. So most of all the chapter on Galileo. Your main argument against the published part, but also against the whole of Husserl's work, is the following: you accept the achievements of Husserl in the area of epistemology but deny that they are a philosophically respectable undertaking. Epistemology may be a prologue to philosophy, but it is not a philosophical beginning. In none of his published writings did Husserl touch on any fundamental problem of philosophy, and it can hardly be expected that his literary estate would reveal new dimensions. There are several things to be said to this point. In the first place, it is a matter of personal evaluation whether one will refuse philosophical rank to an "epistemological achievement," as you call Husserl's work. I am convinced that the discovery of the prepredicative sphere, the uncovering of the problem of intersubjectivity, the retracing of logic, mathematics and the natural sciences back to the grounds of the life­ world, contributions to the analysis of the consciousness of inner time and to the constitution of space: these examples culled from the fullness of his work do indeed touch upon philosophically fundamental problems. 2 For the relationship between Erlc Voegelin and A1fred Schutz, see Helmut Wagner, Alfred Schutz. An Intellectual Biography, Chapter 12 (the letter of Schutz to Voegelin translated here is discussed, pp. 191ft). HUSSERL'S CR/SIS OF WESTERN SCIENCE 279 I do not know whether one has to apply the ideal-typical academic con­ cept of epistemology to this kind of investigation; in principle it makes no difference to me. If this should be the case, epistemology is a pursuit worthy of a philosopher. I would go even further and say that it is just these-and perhaps only these-problems that can be treated within Husserl's ideal framework of a "philosophy as strict science. " But I fully understand and even share the notion that beyond this ideal there exist philosophically fundamental problems that cannot be made accessible with the means of a rigorously scientific method; they demand the courage to do metaphysics. (As you know, I personally feIt the need to supplement my phenomeno­ logical studies through Leibniz and Kierkegaard). Perhaps you will rightly and justifiably respond that Husserl daimed to have laid out, if not constructed, a genuine and definite system of a universal philosophy in his transcendental phenomenology-and this in contrast to his phenomenological psychology under the title of which fall, with a few excep­ tions, almost all his published works. I openly confess that I cannot pose as adefender of transcendental phenomenology because I fear it collapsed at decisive places. For instance, it did not escape transcendental solipsism, nor did it overcome the rift in the conception of the "constitution of the world by the transcendental ego": it begins with the construction of the world of experience by consciousness and ends up with the creation of the world by the ego-become-god. I ascribe much of the responsibility for these outcomes to Eugen Fink. What I have heard from hirn about so-called "constructive phenomenology" (dealing with birth and death, life and ageing, and other genuinely metaphys­ ical questions) has not made me confident that the publication of the literary estate of Husserl will offer a solution to the metaphysical questions, and therefore to the fundamental problems in your terms. However, I expect many contributions to the solution of most important questions of the type of Husserl's posthumous essays about the "Origin of Geometry" and the "Analysis of the Constitution of Space" (essays you may know); they are for me contributions of this kind. All this does not alter the fact that we can do justice to Husserl's last work even ifwe do not find in it the solution to philosophically fundamental problems. However, for this purpose we must make the problem posed in this essay our own. Nothing is more fruitless than to reproach a writer for showing interest in problems not of interest to the reader, to accuse hirn of not having seen the world with the reader's eyes and of deeming other things more relevant than those dose to the reader's concerns. And this is what I fear you are doing in part of your otherwise excellent critique. Here I arrive at a basic remark. You treat Husserl's essayas though he intended to develop an image of the cultural history of mankind, and that from a speculative perspective. The characteristic problems ofthe Averroistic speculation, correctly characterized 280 ALFRED SCHUTZ by you, arise only from the grounds of such an ideal of the philosophical contemplation of history.3 Only from there may one explain the contradic­ tion between the two possibilities of understanding the world which you characterize as the Christian Orthodoxy and the Heterodoxy of Siger of Brabant. Certainly, questions of the relationship between world soul and individual soul belong to a historically collectivist metaphysics. And in this general sphere there appear theological problems of the kind you describe as the Zenoistic, Averroistic, and Kantian types. You accuse Husserl of having shifted the problem of humanity from this universality to his tory and of having narrowed the conception of "humanity," making "man" into the finite historical product of only certain periods of human history-of antiquity and the modern age. Had it been Husserl's intention, in his essay, to carry out a philosophical speculation of the kind you specified, all three of your objections would be justified even though they do not agree weIl with one another-namely, 1) that Husserl did not occupy clearly a philosophically basic position with respect to the history of mankind, 2) that he shifted the problem from the universal sphere to that of history, 3) that his historical image of the world is insufficient because of its narrow selectiveness. Moreover, ifHusserl had aspired to write a philosophy ofhistory that was cosmopolitan in intent, and were his concepts of "originary foundation" and "final foundation" to be understood in the sense of a progressive ideal like that of Kant, then omission of the Kantian "astonishment" about the attempt to interpret all prehistory only as a step toward the final foundation would indeed be reason for concern. Were this so, the temptation would be great to view Husserl's essay as an example of a "demonic" historiography, his philosophy of history as that of a typical philosophy in the three phases [of history], and hirnself as a "messianic doomsday figure of our time." If Husserl had aimed at writing history, he certainly would not have ignored the self­ witnessing of great thinkers.
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