Husserl: Phenomenology and the Crisis of Western Man

EDMUND HUSSERL: Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man
Lecture delivered by Edmund Husserl, Vienna, io May I935; therefore often
referred to as: "The Vienna Lecture".
I
In this lecture I will venture an attempt to awaken new interest in the oft-
treated theme of the European crisis by developing the philosophico-historical
idea (or the teleological sense) of European man. 1 In so far as in thus developing
the topic I bring out the essential function that philosophy and its ramifications
in our sciences have to perform in this process, the European crisis will also be
given added clarification.
We can illustrate this in terms of the well-known distinction between scientific
medicine and 'naturopathy'. Just as in the common life of peoples the latter
derives from naYve experience and tradition, so scientific medicine results from
the utilization of insights belonging to purely theoretical sciences concerned with
the human body, primarily anatomy and physiology. These in turn are based on
those fundamental sciences that seek a universal explanation of nature as such,
physics and chemistry.
Now let us turn our gaze from man's body to his spirit, the theme of the so-
called humanistic sciences. 2 In these sciences theoretical interest is directed
exclusively to human beings as persons, to their personal life and activity, as also
cotrelatively to the concrete results of this activity. To live as a person is to live
in a social framework, wherein I and we live together in community and have
the community as a horizon? Now, communities are structured in various
simple or complex forms, such as family, nation, or international community.
Here the world 'live' is not to be taken in a physiological sense but rather as
signifying purposeful living, manifesting spiritual creativity in the broadest
sense, creating culture within historical continuity. It is this that forms the theme
of various humanistic sciences. Now, there is an obvious difference between
healthy growth and decline, or to put it another way, between health and
sickness, even for societies, for peoples, for states. In consequence there arises the
not so farfetched question: how is it that in this connection there has never arisen
a medical science concerned with nations and with international communities?
The European nations are sick; Europe itself, they say, is in critical condition.
Nor in this situation are there lacking all sorts of nature therapies. We are, in
fact, quite overwhelmed with a torrent of naYve and extravagant suggestions for
reform. But why is it that so luxuriantly developed humanistic sciences here fail
to perform the service that in their own sphere the natural sciences perform so
competently?
Those who are familiar with the spirit of modern science will not be
embarrassed for an answer. The greatness of the natural sciences consists in their
refusal to be content with an observational empiricism, since for them all
descriptions of nature are but methodical procedures for arriving at exact
explanations, ultimately physico-chemical explanations. They are of the opinion
that 'merely descriptive' sciences tie us to the finitudes of our earthly environing
world? Mathematically exact natural science, however, embraces with its
method the infinites contained in its actualities and real possibilities. It sees in
the intuitively given a merely subjective appearance, and it teaches how to
investigate intersubjective ('objective') s nature itself with systematic
approximation on the basis of elements and laws that are unconditionally
universal. At the same time, such exact science teaches how to explain all
intuitively pre-given concretions, whether men, or animals, or heavenly bodies,
by an appeal to what is ultimate, i.e., how to induce from the appearances,
which are the data in any factual case, future possibilities and probabilities, and
to do this with a universality and exactitude that surpasses any empiricism
limited to intuition. 6 The consistent development of exact sciences in modern
times has been a true revolution in the technical mastery of nature.
In the humanistic sciences the methodological situation (in the sense already
quite intelligible to us) is unfortunately quite different, and this for internal
reasons. Human spirituality 7 is, it is true, based on the human physis, each
individually human soul-life is founded on corporeality, and thus too each
community on the bodies of the individual human beings who are its members.
If, then, as is done in the sphere of nature, a really exact explanation and
consequently a similarly extensive scientific practical application is to become
possible for the phenomena belonging to the humanistic sciences, then must the
practitioners of the humanistic sciences consider not only the spirit as spirit but
must also go back to its bodily foundations, and by employing the exact sciences
of physics and chemistry, carry through their explanations. The attempt to do
this, however, has been unsuccessful (and in the foreseeable future there is no
remedy to be had) due to the complexity of the exact psycho-physical research
needed in the case of individual human beings, to say nothing of the great
historical communities. If the world were constructed of two, so to speak, equal
spheres of reality - nature and spirit neither with a preferential position
methodologically and factually, the situation would be different. But only nature
can be handled as a self-contained world; only natural science can with complete
consistency abstract from all that is spirit and consider nature purely as nature.
On the other side such a consistent abstraction from nature does not, for the
practitioner of humanistic science who is interested purely in the spiritual, lead
to a self-contained 'world', a world whose interrelationships are purely spiritual,
that could be the theme of a pure and universal humanistic science, parallel to
pure natural science. Animal spirituality, 8 that of the human and animal 'souls',
to which all other spirituality is referred, is in each individual instance causally
based on corporeality. It is thus understandable that the practitioner of
humanistic science, interested solely in the spiritual as such, gets no further than
the descriptive, than a historical record of spirit, and thus remains tied to
intuitive finitudes. Every example manifests this. A historian, for example,
cannot, after all, treat the history of ancient Greece without taking into
consideration the physical geography of ancient Greece; he cannot treat its
architecture without considering the materiality of its buildings, etc., etc. That
seems clear enough.
What is to be said, then, if the whole mode of thought that reveals itself in this
presentation rests on fatal prejudices and is in its results partly responsible for
Europe's sickness? I am convinced that this is the case, and in this way I hope to
2
make understandable that herein lies an essential source for the conviction which
the modern scientist has that the possibility of grounding a purely self-contained
and universal science of the spirit is not even worth mentioning, with the result
that he flatly rejects it.
It is in the interests of our Europe-problem to penetrate a bit more deeply into
this question and to expose the above, at first glance lucidly clear, argumentation.
The historian, the investigator of spirit, of culture, constantly has of course
physical nature too among the phenomena with which he is concerned; in our
example, nature in ancient Greece. But this is not nature in the sense understood
by natural science; rather it is nature as it was for the ancient Greeks, natural
reality present to their eyes in the world that surrounded them. To state it more
fully; the historical environing world of the Greeks is not the objective world in
our sense; rather it is their 'representation of the world', i.e., their own subjective
evaluation, with all the realities therein that were valid for them, for example
the gods, the demons, etc.
Environing world is a concept that has its place exclusively in the spiritual
sphere. That we live in our own particular environing world, to which all our
concerns and efforts are directed, points to an event that takes place purely in
the spiritual order. Our environing world is a spiritual structure in us and in our
historical life. 9 Here, then, there is no reason for one who makes his theme the
spirit as spirit to demand for it any but a purely spiritual explanation. And this
has general validity: to look upon environing nature as in itself alien to spirit, and
consequently to desire to support humanistic science with natural science and
thus presumably to make the former exact, is nonsense.
Obviously, too, it is forgotten that natural science (like all sciences as such) is a
title for spiritual activities, those of natural scientists in cooperation with each
other; as such these activities belong, as do all spiritual occurrences, to the realm
of what should be explained by means of a science of the spirit. 1ø Is it not, then,
nonsensical and circular, to desire to explain by means of natural science the
historical event 'natural science', to explain it by invoking natural science and its
laws of nature, both of which, as produced by spirit, TM are themselves part of the
problem?
Blinded by naturalism (no matter how much they themselves may verbally
oppose it), the practitioners of humanistic science have completely neglected
even to pose the problem of a universal and pure science of the spirit and to seek
a theory of the essence of spirit as spirit, a theory that pursues what is
unconditionally universal in the spiritual order with its own elements and its
own laws. Yet this last should be done with a view to gaining thereby scientific
explanations in an absolutely conclusive sense.
The preceding reflections proper to a science of the spirit provide us with the
right attitude for grasping and handling our theme of spiritual Europe as a
problem belonging purely to science of the spirit, first of all from the point of
view of spirit's history. As has already been stated in the introductory remarks, in
following this path we should reveal an extraordinary teleology, which is, so to
speak, innate only in our Europe. This, moreover, is most intimately connected
with the eruption (or the invasion) of philosophy and of its ramifications, the
sciences, in the ancient Greek spirit. We already suspect that there will be
question of clarifying the profoundest reasons for the origin of fatal naturalism, or
and this is of equal importance - of modern dualism in interpreting the world.
Ultimately the proper sense of European man's crisis should thereby come to
light.
We may ask, 'How is the spiritual image of Europe to be characterized?' This
does not mean Europe geographically, as it appears on maps, as though European
man were to be in this way confined to the circle of those who live together in
this territory. In the spiritual sense it is clear that to Europe belong the English
dominions, the United States, etc., but not, however, the Eskimos or Indians of
the country fairs, or the Gypsies, who are constantly wandering about Europe.
Clearly the title Europe designates the unity of a spiritual life and a creative
activity - with all its aims, interests, cares and troubles, with its plans, its
establishments, its institutions. Therein individual human beings work in a
variety of societies, on different levels, in families, races, TM nations, all intimately
joined together in spirit and, as I said, in the unity of one spiritual image. This
should stamp on persons, groups, and all their cultural accomplishments an all-
unifying character.
'The spiritual image of Europe' - what is it? It is exhibiting the philosophical idea
immanent in the history of Europe (of spiritual Europe). To put it another way,
it is its immanent teleology, which, if we consider mankind in general, manifests
itself as a new human epoch emerging and beginning to grow, the epoch of a
humanity that from now on will and can live only in the free fashioning of its
being and its historical life out of rational ideas and infinite tasks. 13
Every spiritual image has its place essentially in a universal historical space or in a
particular unity of historical time in terms of coexistence or succession - it has its
history. If, then, we follow historical connections, beginning as we must with
ourselves and our own nation, historical continuity leads us ever further away
from our own to neighboring nations, and so from nation to nation, from age to
age. Ultimately we come to ancient times and go from the Romans to the
Greeks, to the Egyptians, the Persians, etc., in this there is clearly no end. We go
back to primeval times, and we must perforce turn to Menghin's significant and
genial work The History of the Stone Age. 14 To an investigation of this type
mankind manifests itself as a single life of men and of peoples, bound together by
spiritual relationships alone, filled with all types of human beings and of cultures,
but constantly flowing each into the other. It is like a sea in which human beings,
peoples, are the waves constantly forming, changing, and disappearing, some
more richly, more complexly involved, others more simply.
In this process consistent, penetrating observation reveals new, characteristic
compositions and distinctions. No matter how inimical the European nations
may be toward each other, still they have a special inner affinity of spirit that
permeates all of them and transcends their national differences. It is a sort of
fraternal relationship that gives us the consciousness of being at home in this
circle. This becomes immediately evident as soon as, for example, we penetrate
sympathetically into the historical process of India, with its many peoples and
cultural forms. In this circle there is again the unity of a family-like relationship,
4
but one that is strange to us. On the other hand, Indians find us strangers and find
only in each other their fellows. Still, this essential distinction between
fellowship and strangeness, which is relativized on many levels and is a basic
category of all historicity, cannot suffice. Historical humanity does not always
divide itself in the same way according to this category. We get a hint of that
right in our own Europe. Therein lies something unique, which all other human
groups, too, feel with regard to us, something that apart from all considerations
of expediency, becomes a motivation for them - despite their determination to
retain their spiritual autonomy - constantly to Europeanize themselves, whereas
we, if we understand ourselves properly, will never, for example, Indianize
ourselves? I mean we feel (and with all its vagueness this feeling is correct) that
in our European humanity there is an innate entelechy that thoroughly controls
the changes in the European image and gives to it the sense of a development in
the direction of an ideal image of life and of being, as moving toward an eternal
pole. It is not as though there were question here of one of those known
orientations that give to the physical realm of organic beings its character - not a
question, therefore, of something like biological development in stages from
seminal form up to maturity followed by ageing and dying out. There is
essentially no zoology of peoples. They are spiritual unities. They have not, and
above all the supernationality Europe has not, a mature from that has been or
can be reached, no form of regular repetition. From the point of view of soul,
humanity has never been a finished product, nor will it be, nor can it ever repeat
itself. 16 The spiritual telos of European Man, in which is included the particular
telos of separate nations and of individual human beings, lies in infinity; it is an
infinite idea, toward which in secret the collective spiritual becoming, so to
speak, strives. Just as in the development it becomes a conscious telos, so too it
becomes necessarily practical as a goal of the will, and thereby is introduced a
new, a higher stage of development that is guided by norms, by normarive ideas.
All of this, however, is not intended as a speculative interpretation of our
historicity but rather as the expression of a vital anticipation arising out of
unprejudiced reflection. But this anticipation serves as intentional guidance 17
toward seeing in European history extraordinarily significant connections, in the
pursuit of which the anticipated becomes for us guaranteed certainty.
Anticipation is the emotional guide to all discoveries.
Let us develop this. Spiritually Europe has a birthplace. By this I do not mean a
geographical place, in some one land, though this too is true. I refer, rather, to a
spiritual birthplace in a nation or in certain men or groups of men belonging to
this nation. It is the ancient Greek nation 18 in the seventh and sixth centuries
B.C. In it there grows up a new kind of attitude 19 of individuals toward their
environing world. Consequent upon this emerges a completely new type of
spiritual structure, rapidly growing into a systematically rounded (geschlossen)
cultural form that the Greeks called philosophy. Correctly translated, in its
original sense, this bespeaks nothing but universal science, science of the world as
a whole, of the universal unity of all being. Very soon the interest in the totality
and, by the same token, the question regarding the all-embracing becoming and
the resulting being begin to particularize themselves in accord with the general
forms and regions of being. 2ø Thus philosophy, the one science, is ramified into
the various particular sciences.
In the emergence of philosophy in this sense, a sense, that is, which includes all
sciences, I see - no matter how paradoxical this may seem - the original
phenomenon of spiritual Europe. The elucidations that follow, however brief
they must be kept, will soon eliminate the seeming paradox.
Philosophy-science 21 is the title for a special class of cultural structures. The
historical movement that has taken on the form of European supernationality
goes back to an ideal image whose dimension is the infinite; not, however, to an
image that could be recognized in a merely external morphological examination
of changing forms. To have a norm constantly in view is something intimately a
part of the intentional life of individual persons and consequently of nations and
of particular societies within the latter, and ultimately of the organism formed by
the nations united together as Europe. This, of course, is not true of all persons
and, therefore, is not fully developed in the higher-level personalities constituted
by intersubjective acts. Still, it is present in them in the form of a necessary
progressive development and extension in the spirit of universally valid norms.
This spirit, however, signifies at the same time the progressive transformations of
collective humanity beginning with the effective formation of ideas in small and
even in the smallest circles. Ideas, conceived within individual persons as sense-
structures that in a wonderfully new manner secrete within themselves
intentional infinities, are not in space like real things, which latter, entering as
they do into the field of human experiences, do not by that very fact as yet
signify anything for the human being as a person. With the first conception of
ideas man gradually becomes a new man. His spiritual being enters into the
movement of a progressive reformation. This movement from the very beginning
involves communication and awakens a new style of personal existence in its
vital circle by a better understanding of a correspondingly new becoming. In this
movement first of all (and subsequently even beyond it) a special type of
humanity spreads out, living in finitude but oriented toward poles of infinity. By
the very same token there grows up a new mode of sociality and a new form of
enduring society, whose spiritual life, cemented together by a common love of
and creation of ideas and by the setting of ideal norms for life, carries within
itself a horizon of infinity for the future - an infinity of generations finding
constant spiritual renewal in ideas. This takes place first of all in the spiritual
territory of a single nation, the Greeks, as a development of philosophy and of
philosophical communities. Along with this there grows, first in this nation, a
general cultural spirit that draws the whole of mankind under its sway and is
therefore a progressive transformation in the shape of a new historicity. 
This rough sketch will gain in completeness and intelligibility as we examine
more closely the historical origin of philosophical and scientific man and thereby
clarify the sense of Europe and, consequently, the new type of historicity that
through this sort of development distinguishes itself from history in general?
First, let us elucidate the remarkable character of philosophy as it unfolds in
ever-new special sciences. Let us contrast it with other forms of culture already
present in prescientific man, in his artefacts, his agriculture, his architecture, etc.
All manifest classes of cultural products along with the proper methods for
insuring their successful production. Still, they have a transitory existence in their
environing world. Scientific achievements, on the other hand, once the method
of insuring their successful creation has been attained, have an entirely different
mode of being, an entirely different temporality. They do not wear out, they are
imperishable. Repeated creation does not produce something similar, at best
something similarly useful. Rather, no matter how many times the same person
or any number of persons repeat these achievements, they remain exactly
identical, identical in sense and in value. Persons united together in actual mutual
understanding can only experience what their respective fellows have produced
in the same manner as identical with what they have produced themselves? In a
word, what scientific activity achieves is not real but ideal.
What is more, however, whatever validity or truth has been gained in this way
serves as material for the production of higher-level idealities; and this goes on
and on. Now, in the developed theoretical interest, each interest receives ahead
of time the sense of a merely relative goal; it becomes a transition to constantly
new, higher-level goals in an infinity preindicated as science's universal field of
endeavor, its 'domain'. Thus science designates the idea of an infinity of tasks, of
which at any time a finite number have already been accomplished and are
retained in their enduring validity. These constitute at the same time the fund of
premises for an endless horizon of tasks united into one all-embracing task.
Here, however, an important supplementary remark should be made. In science
the ideality of what is produced in any particular instance means more than the
mere capacity for repetition based on a sense that has been guaranteed as
identical; the idea of truth in the scientific sense is set apart (and of this we have
still to speak) from the truth proper to pre-scientific life. Scientific truth claims
to be unconditioned truth, which involves infinity, giving to each factually
guaranteed truth a merely relative character, making it only an approach
oriented, in fact, toward the infinite horizon, wherein the truth in itself is, so to
speak, looked on as an infinitely distant point? By the same token this infinity
belongs also to what in the scientific sense 'really is'. A fortiori, there is infinity
involved in 'universal' validity for 'everyone', as the subject of whatever rational
foundations are to be secured; nor is this any longer everyone in the finite sense
the term has in prescientific life. 6
Having thus characterized the ideality peculiar to science, with the ideal
infinities variously implied in the very sense of science, we are faced, as we
survey the historical situation, with a contrast that we express in the following
proposition: no other cultural form in the pre-philosophical historical horizon is
a culture of ideas in the above-mentioned sense; none knows any infinite tasks -
none knows of such universes of idealities that as wholes and in all their details,
as also in their methods of production, bear within themselves an essential
infinity.
Extra-scientific culture, not yet touched by science, is a task accomplished by
man in finitude. The openly endless horizon around him is not made available to
him. His aims and activities, his commerce and his travel, his personal, social,
national, mythical motivation - all this moves about in an environing world
whose finite dimensions can be viewed. Here there are no infinite tasks, no ideal
attainments whose very infinity is man's field of endeavor - a field of endeavor
such that those who work in it are conscious that it has the mode of being
proper to such an infinite sphere of tasks.
With the appearance of Greek philosophy, however, and with its first definite
formulation in a consistent idealizing of the new sense of infinity, there occurs,
from this point of view, a progressive transformation that ultimately draws into
its orbit all ideas proper to finitude and with them the entire spiritual culture of
mankind. For us Europeans there are, consequently, even outside the
philosophico-scientific sphere, any number of infinite ideas (if we may use the
expression), but the analogous character of infinity that they have (infinite tasks,
goals, verifications, truths, 'true values', 'genuine goods', 'absolutely' valid norms)
is due primarily to the transformation of man through philosophy and its
idealities. Scientific culture in accord with ideas of infinity means, then, a
revolutionizing of all culture, a revolution that affects man's whole manner of
being as a creator of culture. It means also a revolutionizing of historicity, which
is now the history of finite humanity's disappearance, to the extent that it grows
into a humanity with infinite tasks.
Here we meet the obvious objection that philosophy, the science of the Greeks,
is not, after all, distinctive of them, something which with them first came into
the world. They themselves tell of the wise Egyptians, Babylonians, etc.; and they
did in fact learn much from these latter. Today we possess all sorts of studies on
Indian, Chinese, and other philosophies, studies that place these philosophies on
the same level with Greek philosophy, considering them merely as different
historical formulations of one and the same cultural idea. Of course, there is not
lacking something in common. Still, one must not allow intentional depths to be
covered over by what is merely morphologically common and be blind to the
most essential differences of principle.
Before anything else, the attitude of these two kinds of 'philosophers', the overall
orientation of their interests, is thoroughly different. Here and there one may
observe a world-embracing interest that on both sides (including, therefore, the
Indian, Chinese and other like 'philosophies') leads to universal cognition of the
world, everywhere developing after the manner of a sort of practical vocational
interest and for quite intelligible reasons leading to vocational groups, in which
from generation to generation common results are transmitted and even
developed. Only with the Greeks, however, do we find a universal
('cosmological') vital interest in the essentially new form of a purely 'theoretical'
attitude? This is true, too, of the communal form in which the interest works
itself out, the corresponding, essentially new attitude of the philosophers and the
scientists (mathematicians, astronomers, etc.). These are the men who, not
isolated but with each other and for each other, i.e., bound together in a common
interpersonal endeavor, strive for and carry into effect theoria and only theoria.
These are the ones whose growth and constant improvement ultimately, as the
circle of cooperators extends and the generations of investigators succeed each
other, become a will oriented in the direction of an infinite and completely
universal task. The theoretical attitude has its historical origin in the Greeks.
Speaking generally, attitude bespeaks a habitually, determined manner of vital
willing, wherein the will's directions or interests, its aims and its cultural
accomplishments, are preindicated and thus the overall orientation determined.
In this enduring orientation taken as a norm, the individual life is lived. The
concrete cultural contents change in a relatively enclosed historicity. In its
historical situation mankind (or the closed community, such as a nation, a race,
etc.) always lives within the framework of some sort of attitude. Its life always
has a normative orientation and within this a steady historicity or development.
Thus if the theoretical attitude in its newness is referred back to a previous,
more primitive normative attitude, the theoretical is characterized as a
transformed attitude. 28 Looking at the historicity of human existence universally
in all its communal forms and in its historical stages, we find, then, that
essentially a certain style of human existence (taken in formal universality)
points to a primary historicity, within which the actual normative style of
culture-creating existence at any time, no matter what its rise or fall or
stagnation, remains formally the same. In this regard we are speaking of the
natural, the native attitude, of originally natural life, of the first primitively
natural form of cultures - be they higher or lower, uninhibitedly developing or
stagnating. All other attitudes, then, refer back to these natural ones as
transformations of them? To put it more concretely, in an attitude natural to
one of the actual human groups in history there must arise at a point in time
motives that for the first time impel individual men and groups having this
attitude to transform it.
How are we, then, to characterize the essentially primitive attitude, the
fundamental historical mode of human existence? The answer: on the basis of
generation men naturally live in communities - in a family, a race, a nation - and
these communities are in themselves more or less abundantly subdivided into
particular social units. Now, life on the level of nature is characterized as a
naively direct living immersed in the world, in the world that in a certain sense is
constantly there consciously as a universal horizon but is not, merely by that fact,
thematic. Thematic is that toward which man's attention is turned. Being
genuinely alive is always having one's attention turned to this or that, turned to
something as to an end or a means, as relevant or irrelevant, interesting or
indifferent, private or public, to something that is in daily demand or to
something that is startlingly new. All this belongs to the world horizon, but there
is need of special motives if the one who is caught up in such a life in the world
is to transform himself and it to come to the point where he somehow makes
this world itself his theme, where he conceives an enduring interest in it.
But here more detailed explanations are needed. Individual human beings who
change their attitudes as human beings belonging to their own general vital
community (their nation), have their particular natural interests (each his own).
These they can by no change in attitude simply lose; that would mean for each
ceasing to be the individual he is, the one he has been since birth. No matter
what the circumstances, then, the transformed attitude can only be a temporary
one. It can take on a lasting character that will endure as a habit throughout an
entire life only in the form of an unconditional determination of will to take up
9
again the selfsame attitudes in a series of periods that are temporary but
intimately bound together. It will mean that by virtue of a continuity that
bridges intentionally the discreteness involved, men will hold on to the new type
of interests as worth being realized and will embody them in corresponding
cultural forms. 31
We are familiar with this sort of thing in the occupations that make their
appearance even in a naturally primitive form of cultural life, where there are
temporary periods devoted to the occupation, periods that interrupt the rest of
life with its concrete temporality (e.g., the working hours of a functionary, etc.).
Now, there are two possibilities. On the one hand, the interests of the new
attitude will be made subservient to the natural interests of life, or what is
essentially the same, to natural practicality. In this case the new attitude is itself a
practical one. This, then, can have a sense similar to the practical attitude of the
politician, who as a state functionary is attentive to the common good and whose
attitude, therefore, is to serve the practical interests of all (and incidentally his
own). This sort of thing admittedly still belongs to the domain of the natural
attitude, which is, of course, different for different types of community members
and is in fact one thing for the leaders of the community and another for the
'citizens' - both obviously understood in the broadest sense. In any event, the
analogy makes it clear that the universality of a practical attitude, in this case one
that embraces a whole world, need in no way signify being interested in and
occupied with all the details and particularities of that world - it would
obviously be unthinkable.
In contrast to the higher-level practical attitude there exists, however, still
another essential possibility of a change in the universal natural attitude (with
which we shall soon become acquainted in its type, the mythical-religious
attitude), which is to say, the theoretical attitude - a name being given to it, of
course, only provisionally, because in this attitude philosophical theoria must
undergo a development and so become its proper aim or field of interest. The
theoretical attitude, even though it too is a professional attitude, is thoroughly
unpractical. Thus it is based on a deliberate epoche from all practical interests, 32
and consequently even those of a higher level, that serve natural needs within the
framework of a life's occupation governed by such practical interests.
Still, it must at the same time be said that there is no question here of a
definitive 'cutting off  of the theoretical life from the practical. We are not saying
that the concrete life of the theoretical thinker falls into two disconnected vital
continuities partitioned off from each other, which would mean, socially
speaking, that two spiritually unconnected spheres would come into existence.
For there is still a third form of universal attitude possible (in contrast both to
the mythical-religious, which is based on the natural, and to the theoretical
attitudes). It is the synthesis of opposing interests that occurs in the transition
from the theoretical to the practical attitude. In this way thoeria (the universal
science), whose growth has manifested a tight unity through an epoche from all
practical considerations, is called upon (and even proves in a theoretical insight 33
that it is called upon) to serve humanity in a new way, first of all in its concrete
existence as it continues to live naturally. This takes place in the form of a new
10
kind of practical outlook, a universal critique of all life and of its goals, of all the
forms and systems of culture that have already grown up in the life of mankind.
This brings with it a critique of mankind itself and of those values that explicitly
or implicitly guide it. Carrying it to a further consequence, it is a practical
outlook whose aim is to elevate mankind through universal scientific reason in
accord with norms of truth in every form, and thus to transform it into a
radically new humanity made capable of an absolute responsibility to itself on
the basis of absolute theoretical insights? Still, prior to this synthesis of
theoretical universality and a practical outlook with universal interests, there is
obviously another synthesis of theory and practice - the utilization of the limited
results of theory, of those special sciences that are limited to the practical aspects
of natural life, having relinquished by their very specialization the universality of
theoretical interest. Here the primitively natural attitude and the theoretical are
joined together in an orientation toward finite goals.
For a profounder understanding of Greco-European science (universally
speaking, this means philosophy) in its fundamental difference from the equally
notable oriental 'philosophies', it is now necessary to consider in more detail the
practically universal attitude, and to explain it as mythical-religious, an attitude
that, prior to European science, brings those other philosophies into being. It is a
well-known fact, to say nothing of an essentially obvious necessity, that
mythical-religious motives and a mythical-religious practice together belong to a
humanity living naturally - before Greek philosophy, and with it a scientific
world view, entered on the scene and matured. A mythical-religious attitude is
one that takes as its theme the world as a totality - a practical theme. The world
in this case is, of course, one that has a concrete, traditional significance for the
men in question (let us say, a nation) and is thus mythically apperceived. This
sort of mythical-natural attitude embraces from the very first not only men and
animals and other infrahuman and infra-animal beings (Wesen) but also the
suprahuman. The view that embraces them as a totality is a practical one; not,
however, as though man, whose natural life, after all, is such that he is actually
interested only in certain realities, could ever have come to the point where
everything together would suddenly and in equal degree take on practical
relevance. Rather, to the extent that the whole world is looked upon as
dominated by mythical powers and to the extent that human destiny depends
immediately or mediarely on the way these powers rule in the world, a
universally mythical world view may have its source in practicality and is, then,
itself a world view, whose interests are practical. It is understandable that priests
belonging to a priesthood in charge of both mythical-religious interests and of the
traditions belonging to them should have motives for such a mythical-religious
attitude. With this priesthood these arises and spreads the linguistically solidified
'knowledge' of these mythical powers (in the broadest sense though of as
personal). This knowledge quasi-automatically takes on the form of a mystical
speculation which, by setting itself up as a naively convincing interpretation,
transforms the mythos itself. At the same time, obviously, attention is constantly
directed also to the ordinary world ruled by these mythical powers and to the
human and infrahuman beings belonging to it (these, incidentally, unsettled in
11
their own essential being, are also open to the influence of mythical factors). This
attention looks to the ways in which the powers control the events of this world,
the manner in which they themselves must be subject to a unified supreme
order of power, the manner in which they with regard to individual functions
and functioners intervene by initiating and carrying out, by handing down
decrees of fate. All this speculative knowledge however, has as its purpose to
serve man toward his human aims, to enable him to live the happiest possible
life on earth, to protect that life from sickness, from misfortune, need and death.
It is understandable that in this mythico-practical approach to knowing the
world there can arise not a little knowledge of the actual world, of the world
known in a sort of scientific experience, a knowledge subsequently to be
subjected to a scientific evaluation. Still, this sort of knowledge is and remains
mythico-practical in its logical connections, and it is a mistake for someone
brought up in the scientific modes of thought initiated in Greece and
progressively developed in modern times to speak of Indian and Chinese
philosophy (astronomy, mathematics) and thus to interpret India, Babylonia, and
China in a European way?
There is a sharp cleavage, then, between the universal but mythico-practical
attitude and the 'theoretical', which by every previous standard is unpractical,
the attitude of thaumazein [Gr. - to wonder], to which the great men of Greek
philosophy's first culminating period, Plato and Aristotle, trace the origin of
philosophy. Men are gripped by a passion for observing and knowing the world,
a passion that turns from all practical interests and in the closed circle of its own
knowing activities, in the time devoted to this sort of investigation, accomplishes
and wants to accomplish only pure theoria 36. In other words, man becomes the
disinterested spectator, overseer of the world, he becomes a philosopher. More
than that, from this point forward his life gains a sensitivity for motives which
are possible only to this attitude, for novel goals and methods of thought, in the
framework of which philosophy finally comes into being and man becomes
philosopher.
Like everything that occurs in history, of course, the introduction of the
theoretical attitude has its factual motivation in the concrete circumstances of
historical events. Therefore it is worth-while to explain in this connection how,
considering the manner of life and the horizon of Greek man in the seventh
century B.C., in his intercourse with the great and already highly cultivated
nations surrounding him, that thaumazein could introduce itself and at first
become established in individuals. Regarding this we shall not enter into greater
detail; it is more important for us to understand the path of motivation, with its
sense-giving and sense-creating, which leads from mere conversion (or from mere
thaumazein), to theoria - a historical fact, that nevertheless must have in it
something essential. It is important to explain the change from original theoria,
from the completely 'disinterested' (consequent upon the epoche from all
practical interests) world view (knowledge of the world based only on universal
contemplation) to the theoria proper to science - both stages exemplifying the
contrast between doxa [Gr. - opinion] and episteme [Gr. - knowledge]. The
theoretical interest that comes on the scene as that thaumazein, is clearly a
12
modification of curiosity that has its original place in natural life as an
interruption in the course of 'earnest living', as a working out of originally
effected vital interests, or as a playful looking about when the specific needs of
actual life have been satisfied or working hours are past. Curiosity, too (not in
the sense of an habitual 'vice'), is a modification, an interest raised above merely
vital interests and prescinding from them.
With an attitude such as this, man observes first of all the variety of nations, his
own and others, each with its own environing world, which with its traditions,
its gods and demigods, with its mythical powers, constitutes for each nation the
self-evident, real world. In the face of this extraordinary contrast there arises the
distinction between the represented and the real world, and a new question is
raised concerning the truth - not everyday truth bound as it is to tradition but a
truth that for all those who are not blinded by attachment to tradition is
identical and universally valid, a truth in itself. Thus it is proper to the
theoretical attitude of the philosopher that he is more and more predetermined
to devote his whole future life, in the sense of a universal life, to the task of
theoria, to build theoretical knowledge upon theoretical knowledge in
infinitum. 37
In isolated personalities, like Thales, et al., there thus grows up a new humanity -
men whose profession it is to create a philosophical life, philosophy as a novel
form of culture. Understandably there grows up at the same time a
correspondingly novel form of community living. These ideal forms are, as others
understand them and make them their own, simply taken up and made part of
life. In like manner they lead to cooperative endeavor and to mutual help
through criticism. Even the outsiders, the non-philosophers, have their attention
drawn to the unusual activity that is going on. As they come to understand, they
either become philosophers themselves, or if they are too much taken up with
their own work, they become pupils. Thus philosophy spreads in a twofold
manner, as a widening community of professional philosophers and as a common
educational movement growing along with the former. Here also, however, lies
the origin of the subsequent, so unfortunate internal split in the unity of the
people into educated and uneducated. Still, it is clear that this tendency to spread
is not confined to the limits of the originating nation. Unlike all other cultural
products, this is not a movement of interests bound to the soil of national
traditions. Even foreigners learn in their turn to understand and in general to
share in the gigantic cultural change which streams forth from philosophy. Now
precisely this must be further characterized.
As philosophy spreads in the form of research and training, it produces a twofold
effect. On the one hand, most essential to the theoretical attitude of
philosophical man is the characteristic universality of the critical standpoint,
which its determination not to accept without question any pregiven opinion,
any tradition, and thus to seek out, with regard to the entire universe handed
down in tradition, the true in itself - which is ideal. Yet this is not merely a new
way of looking at knowledge. By virtue of the demand to subject the whole of
experience to ideal norms, i.e., those of unconditional truth, these results at the
same time an allembracing change in the practical order of human existence and
13
thus of cultural life in its entirety. The practical must no longer take its norms
from naive everyday experience and from tradition but from the objective truth.
In this way ideal truth becomes an absolute value that in the movement of
education and in its constant application in the training of children carries with it
a universal revision of practice. If we consider somewhat more in detail the
manner of this transformation, we shall immediately understand the inevitable: if
the general idea of truth in itself becomes the universal norm of all the relative
truths that play a role in human life - actual and conjectural situation truths -
then this fact affects all traditional norms, those of right, of beauty, of purpose, of
dominant values in persons, values having a personal character, etc.
Thus there grows up a special type of man and a special vocation in life
correlative to the attainment of a new culture. Philosophical knowledge of the
world produces not only these special types of result but also a human conduct
that immediately influences the rest of practical living with all its demands and
its aims, aims of the historical tradition according to which one is educated, thus
giving these aims their own validity. A new and intimate community, we might
say a community of ideal interests, is cultivated among men - men who life for
philosophy, united in their dedication to ideas, which ideas are not only of use to
all but are identically the property of all. Inevitably there develops a particular
kind of cooperation whereby men work with each other and for each other,
helping each other by mutual criticism, with the result that the pure and
unconditioned validity of truth grows as a common possession. In addition there
is the necessary tendency toward the promotion of interest, because others
understand what is herein desired and accomplished; and this is a tendency to
include more and more as yet unphilosophical persons in the community of
those who philosophize. This occurs first of all among members of the same
nation. Nor can this expansion be confined to professional scientific research;
rather its success goes far beyond the professional circle, becoming an
educational movement.
Now, if this educational movement spreads to ever wider circles of the people,
and naturally to the superior, dominant types, to those who are less involved in
the cares of life, the results are of what sort? Obviously it does not simply bring
about a homogeneous change in the normal, on the whole satisfactory national
life; rather in all probability it leads to great cleavages, wherein the national life
and the entire national culture go into an upheaval. The conservatives, content
with tradition, and the philosophical circle will struggle against each other, and
without doubt the battle will carry over into the sphere of political power. At
the very beginning of philosophy, persecution sets in. The men dedicated to
those ideas are outlawed. And yet ideas are stronger than any forces rooted in
experience?
A further point to be taken into consideration here is that philosophy, having
grown out of a critical attitude to each and every traditional predisposition, is
limited in its spread by no national boundaries. All that must be present is the
capacity for a universal critical attitude, which too, of course, presupposes a
certain level of prescientific culture. Thus can the upheaval in the national
culture propagate itself, first of all because the progressing universal science
14
becomes a common possession of nations that were at first strangers to each
other, and then because a unified community, both scientific and educational,
extends to the majority of nations.
Still another important point must be adduced; it concerns philosophy's position
in regard to traditions. There are in fact two possibilities to observe here. Either
the traditionally accepted is completely rejected, or its content is taken over
philosophically, and thereby it too is reformed in the spirit of philosophical
ideality. An outstanding case in point is that of religion - from which I should
like to exclude the 'polytheistic religions'. Gods in the plural, mythical powers of
every kind, are objects belonging to the environing world, on the same level of
reality as animal or man. In the concept of God, the singular is essential. 39
Looking at this from the side of man, moreover, it is proper that the reality of
God, both as being and as value, should be experienced as binding man interiorly.
These results, then, an understandable blending of this absoluteness with that of
philosophical ideality. In the overall process of idealization that philosophy
undertakes, God is, so to speak, logicized and becomes even the bearer of the
absolute logos. I should life, moreover, to see a logic in the very fact that
theologically religion invokes faith itself as evidence and thus as a proper and
most profound mode of grounding true being? ø National gods, however, are
simply there as real facts of the environing world, without anyone confronting
philosophy with questions stemming from a critique of cognition, with questions
of evidence.
Substantially, though in a somewhat sketchy fashion, we have now described the
historical movement that makes understandable how, beginning with a few
Greek exceptions, a transformation of human existence and of man's entire
cultural life could be set in motion, beginning in Greece and its nearest
neighbors. Moreover, now it is also discernible how, following upon this, a
supernationality of a completely new kind could arise. I am referring, of course,
to the spiritual form of Europe. It is now no longer a number of different nations
bordering on each other, influencing each other only by commercial competition
and war. Rather a new spirit stemming from philosophy and the sciences based
on it, a spirit of free criticism providing norms for infinite tasks, dominates man,
creating new, infinite ideals. These are ideals for individual men of each nation
and for the nations themselves. Ultimately, however, the expanding synthesis of
nations too has its infinite ideals, wherein each of these nations, by the very fact
that it strives to accomplish its own ideal task in the spirit of infinity, 41
contributes its best to the community of nations. In this give and take the
supernational totality with its graded structure of societies grows apace, filled
with the spirit of one all-inclusive task, infinite in the variety of its branches yet
unique in its infinity. In this total society with its ideal orientation, philosophy
itself retains the role of guide, which is its special infinite task? 2 Philosophy has
the role of a free and universal theoretical disposition that embraces at once all
ideals and the one overall ideal - in short, the universe of all norms. Philosophy
has constantly to exercise through European man its role of leadership for the
whole of mankind.
II
15
It is now time that there be voiced misunderstandings and doubts that are
certainly very importunate and which, it seems to me, derive their suggestive
force from the language of popular prejudice.
Is not what is here being advocated something rather out of place in our times -
saving the honor of rationalism, of enlightenment, of an intellectualism that, lost
in theory, is isolated from the world, with the necessarily bad result that the
quest for learning becomes empty, becomes intellectual snobbishness? Does it
not mean falling back into the fatal error of thinking that science makes men
wise, that science is called upon the create a genuine humanity, superior to
destiny and finding satisfaction in itself?. Who is going to take such thoughts
seriously today?
This objection certainly is relatively justified in regard to the state of
development in Europe from the seventeenth up to the end of the nineteenth
century. But it does not touch the precise sense of what I am saying. I should like
to think that I, seemingly a reactionary, am far more revolutionary than those
who today in word strike so radical a pose.
I, too, am quite sure that the European crisis has its roots in a mistaken
rationalism? That, however, must not be interpreted as meaning that rationality
as such is an evil or that in the totality of human existence it is of minor
importance. The rationality of which alone we are speaking is rationality in that
noble and genuine sense, the original Greek sense, that became an ideal in the
classical period of Greek philosophy - though of course it still needed
considerable clarification through self-examination. It is its vocation, however, to
serve as a guide to mature development. On the other hand, we readily grant
(and in this regard German idealism has spoken long before us) that the form of
development given to ratio in the rationalism of the Enlightenment was an
aberration, but nevertheless an understandable aberration.
Reason is a broad title. According to the good old definition, man is the rational
living being, a sense in which even the Papuan is man and not beast. He has his
aims, and he acts with reflection, considering practical possibilities. As products
and methods grow, they enter into a tradition that is ever intelligible in its
rationality. Still, just as man (and even the Papuan) represents a new level of
animality - in comparison with the beast - so with regard to humanity and its
reason does philosophical reason represent a new level. The level of human
existence with its ideal norms for infinite tasks, the level of existence sub specie
aeternitatis, is, however, possible only in the form of absolute universality,
precisely that which is a priori included in the idea of philosophy. It is true that
universal philosophy, along with all the particular sciences, constitutes only a
partial manifestation of European culture. Contained, however, in the sense of
my entire presentation is the claim that this part is, so to speak, the functioning
brain upon whose normal functioning the genuine, healthy spirit of Europe
depends. The humanity of higher man, of reason, demands, therefore, a genuine
philosophy.
But at this very point there lurks a danger. 'Philosophy' - in that we must
certainly distinguish philosophy as a historical fact belonging to this or that time
from philosophy as idea, idea of an infinite task? The philosophy that at any
16
particular time is his historically actual is the more or less successful attempt to
realize the guiding idea of the infinity, and thereby the totality, of truths.
Practical ideals, viewed as external poles from the line of which one cannot stray
during the whole of life without regret, without being untrue to oneself and thus
unhappy, are in this view by no means yet clear and determined; they are
anticipated in an equivocal generality. Determination comes only with concrete
pursuit and with at least relatively successful action. Here the constant danger is
that of falling into one-sidedness and premature satisfaction, which are punished
in subsequent contradictions. Thence the contrast between the grand claims of
philosophical systems, that are all the while incompatible with each other.
Added to this are the necessity and yet the danger of specialization.
In this way, of course, one-sided rationality can become an evil. It can also be
said that it belongs to the very essence of reason that philosophers can at first
understand and accomplish their infinite task only on the basis of an absolutely
necessary onesidedness? In itself there is no absurdity here, no error. Rather, as
has been remarked, the direct and necessary path for reason allows it initially to
grasp only one aspect of the task, at first without recognizing that a thorough
knowledge of the entire infinite task, the totality of being, involves still other
aspects. When inadequacy reveals itself in obscurities and contradiction, then this
becomes a motive to engage in a universal reflection. Thus the philosopher must
always have as his purpose to master the true and full sense of philosophy, the
totality of its infinite horizons. No one line of knowledge, no individual truth
must be absolutized. Only in such a supreme consciousness of self, which itself
becomes a branch of the infinite task, can philosophy fulfill its function of
putting itself, and therewith a genuine humanity, on the right track. To know
that this is the case, however, also involves once more entering the field of
knowledge proper to philosophy on the highest level of reflection upon itself.
Only on the basis of this constant refiectiveness is a philosophy a universal
knowledge.
I have said that the course of philosophy goes through a period of na'ivet& This,
then, is the place for a critique of the so renowned irrationalism, or it is the place
to uncover the na'ivet6 of that rationalism that passes as genuine philosophical
rationality, and that admittedly is characteristic of philosophy in the whole
modern period since the Renaissance, looking upon itself as the real and hence
universal rationalism. Now, as they begin, all the sciences, even those whose
beginnings go back to ancient times, are unavoidably caught up in this na'ivet&
To put it more exactly, the most general title for this na'ivet6 is objectivism,
which is given a structure in the various types of naturalism, wherein the spirit is
naturalized? 6 Old and new philosophies were and remain naively objectivistic. It
is only right, however, to add that German idealism, beginning with Kant, was
passionately concerned with overcoming the na'ivet6 that had already become
very sensitive. Still, it was incapable of really attaining to the level of superior
refiectiveness that is decisive for the new image of philosophy and of European
man.
What I have just said I can make intelligible only by a few sketchy indications.
Natural man (let us assume, in the pre-philosophical period) is oriented toward
17
the world in all his concerns and activities. The area in which he lives and works
is the environing world which in its spatiotemporal dimensions surrounds him
and of which he considers himself a part. This continues to be true in the
theoretical attitude, which at first can be nothing but that of the disinterested
spectator of a world that is demythologized before his eyes. Philosophy sees in
the world the universe of what is, and world becomes objective world over
against representations of the world - which latter change subjectively, whether
on a national or an individual scale - and thus truth becomes objective truth.
Thus philosophy begins as cosmology. At first, as is self-evident, it is oriented in
its theoretical interest to corporeal nature, since in fact all spatiotemporal data do
have, at least basically, the form of corporeality. Men and beasts are not merely
bodies, but to the view oriented to the environing world they appear as some
sort of corporeal being and thus as realities included in the universal
spatiotemporality. In this way all psychic events, those of this or that ego, such as
experience, thinking, willing, have a certain objectivity. Community life, that of
families, of peoples, and the like, seems then to resolve itself into the life of
particular individuals, who are psychophysical objects. In the light of
psychophysical causality there is no purely spiritual continuity in spiritual
grouping; physical nature envelops everything.
The historical process of development is definitively marked out through this
focus on the environing world. Even the hastiest glance at the corporeality
present in the environing world shows that nature is a homogeneous, unified
totality, a world for itself, so to speak, surrounded by a homogeneous
spatiotemporality and divided into individual things, all similar in being res
extensae and each determining the other causally. Very quickly comes a first and
greatest step in the process of discovery: overcoming the finitude of nature that
has been thought of as objective-in-itself, finitude in spite of the open infinity of
it. Infinity is discovered, and first of all in form of idealized quantities, masses,
numbers, figures, straight lines, poles, surfaces, etc. Nature, space and time
become capable of stretching ideally into infinity and also of being infinitely
divided ideally. From the art of surveying develops geometry; from counting,
arithmetic; from everyday mechanics, mathematical mechanics; etc. Now,
without anyone forming a hypothesis in this regard, the world of perceived
nature is changed into a mathematical world, the world of mathematical natural
sciences. As ancient times moved forward, with the mathematics proper to that
stage, the first discovery of infinite ideals and of infinite tasks was accomplished
simultaneously. That discovery becomes for all subsequent times the guiding star
of the sciences.
How, then, did the intoxicating success of this discovery of physical infinity
affect the scientific mastery of the realm of spirit? In the focus on the environing
world, a constantly objective attitude, everything spiritual appeared to be based
on physical corporeality. Thus an application of the mode of thought proper to
natural science was obvious. For this reason we already find in the early stages
Democritean materialism and determinism. 47 However, the greatest minds
recoiled from this and also from any newer style of psychophysics
(Psychophysik). Since Socrates, man is made thematic precisely as human, man
18
with his spiritual life in society. Man retains an orientation to the objective
world, but with the advent of Plato and Aristotle this world becomes the great
theme of investigations. At this point a remarkable cleavage makes itself felt: the
human belongs to the universe of objective facts, but as persons, as egos, men
have goals, aims. They have norms for tradition, truth norms - eternal norms.
Though the development proceeded haltingly in ancient times, still it was not
lost. Let us make the leap to so-called 'modern' times. With glowing enthusiasm
the infinite task of a mathematical knowledge of nature and in general of a world
knowledge is undertaken. The extraordinary successes of natural knowledge are
now to be extended to knowledge of the spirit. Reason had proved its power in
nature. 'As the sun is one all-illuminating and warming sun, so too is reason one'
(Descartes) .48 The method of natural science must also embrace the mysteries of
spirit. The spirit is reap 9 and objectively in the world, founded as such in
corporeality. With this the interpretation of the world immediately takes on a
predominantly dualistic, i.e., psychophysical, form. The same causality -only split
in two- embraces the one world; the sense of rational explanation is everywhere
the same, but in such a way that all explanation of spirit, in the only way in
which it can be universal, involves the physical. There can be no pure, self-
contained search for an explanation of the spiritual, no purely inneroriented
psychology or theory of spirit beginning with the ego in psychical self-experience
and extending to the other psyche. sø The way that must be traveled is the
external one, the path of physics and chemistry. All the fond talk of common
spirit, of the common will of a people, of nations' ideal political goals, and the
like, are romanticism and mythology, derived from an analogous application of
concepts that have a proper sense only in the individual personal sphere.
Spiritual being is fragmentary. To the question regarding the source of all these
difficulties the following answer is to be given: this objectivism or this
psychophysical interpretation of the world, despite its seeming self-evidence, is a
naive one-sidedness that never was understood to be such. To speak of the spirit
as reality (Realitat), presumably a real (realen) annex to bodies and having its
supposedly spatiotemporal being within nature, is an absurdity.
At this point, however, it is important for our problem of the crisis to show how
it is that the 'modern age', that has for centuries been so proud of its successes in
theory and practice, has itself finally fallen into a growing dissatisfaction and
must even look upon its own situation as distressful. Want has invaded all the
sciences, most recently as a want of method. Moreover, the want that grips us
Europeans, even though it is not understood, involves very many persons. sl
There are all sorts of problems that stem from na'/vet, according to which
objectivistic science holds what it calls the objective world to be the totality of
what is, without paying any attention to the fact that no objective science can do
justice to the subjectivity that achieves science. One who has been trained in the
natural sciences finds it self-evident that whatever is merely subjective must be
eliminated and that the method of natural science, formulated according to a
subjective mode of representation, is objectively determined. In the same
manner he seeks what is objectively true for the psychic too. By the same token,
it is taken for granted that the subjective, eliminated by the physical scientist, is,
19
precisely as psychic, to be investigated in psychology and of course in
psychophysical psychology. The investigator of nature, however, does not make
it clear to himself that the constant foundation of his admittedly subjective
thinking activity is the environing world of life. This latter is constantly
presupposed as the basic working area, in which alone his questions and his
methodology make sense. Where, at the present time, is that powerful bit of
method that leads from the intuitive environing world to the idealizing of
mathematics and its interpretation as objective being, subjected to criticism and
clarification? Einstein's revolutionary changes concern the formulas wherein
idealized and naively objectivized nature (physis) is treated. But regarding the
question of how formulas or mathematical objectification in general are given a
sense based on life and the intuitive environing world, of this we hear nothing.
Thus Einstein does nothing to reformulate the space and time in which our
actual life takes place.
Mathematical science of nature is a technical marvel for the purpose of
accomplishing inductrions whose fruitfulness, probability, exactitude, and
calculability could previously not even be suspected. As an accomplishment it is
a triumph of the human spirit. With regard to the rationality of its methods and
theories, however, it is a thoroughly relative science. It presupposes as data
principles that are themselves thoroughly lacking in actual rationality. In so far as
the intuitive environing world, purely subjective as it is, is forgotten in the
scientific thematic, the working subject is also forgotten, and the scientist is not
studied. 52 (Thus from this point of view the rationality of the exact sciences is on
a level with the rationality of the Egyptian pyramids).
It is true, of course, that since Kant we have a special theory of knowledge, and
on the other hand there is psychology, which with its claims to scientific
exactitude wants to be the universal fundamental science of the spirit. Still, our
hope for real rationality, i.e., for real insight, 53 is disappointed here as elsewhere.
The psychologists simply fail to see that they too study neither themselves nor
the scientists who are doing the investigating nor their own vital environing
world. They do not see that from the very beginning they necessarily presuppose
themselves as a group of men belonging to their own environing world and
historical period. By the same token, they do not see that in pursuing their aims
they are seeking a truth in itself, universally valid for every-one. By its
objectivism psychology simply cannot make a study of the sould in its properly
essential sense, which is to say, the ego that acts and is acted upon. Though by
determining the bodily function involved in an experience of evaluating or
willing, it may objectify the experience and handle it inductively, can it do the
same for purposes, values, norms? Can it study reason as some sort of
'disposition'? Completely ignored is the fact that objectivism, as the genuine
work of the investigator intent upon finding true norms, presupposes just such
norms; that objectivism refuses to be inferred from facts, since in the process
facts are already intended as truths and not as illusions. It is true, of course, that
there exists a feeling for the difficulties present here, with the result that the
dispute over psychologism is fanned into a flame. Nothing is accomplished,
however, by rejecting a psychological grounding of norms, above all of norms for
20
truth in itself. More and more perceptible becomes the overall need for a reform
of modern psychology in its entirety. As yet, however, it is not understood that
psychology through its objectivism has been found wanting; that it simply fails to
get at the proper essence of spirit; that in isolating the soul and making it an
object of thought, that in reinterpreting psychophysically being-in-community, it
is being absurd. True, it has not labored in vain, and it has established many
empirical rules, even practically worthwhile ones. Yet it is no more a real
psychology than moral statistics with its no less worthwhile knowledge is a
moral science?
In our time we everywhere meet the burning need for an understanding of spirit,
while the unclarity of the methodological and factual connection between the
natural sciences and the sciences of the spirit has become almost unbearable.
Dilthey, one of the greatest scientists of the spirit, has directed his whole vital
energy to clarifying the connection between nature and spirit, to clarifying the
role of psychophysical psychology, which he thinks is to be complemented by a
new, descriptive and analytic psychology. Efforts by Windelband and Rickert
have likewise, unfortunately, not brought the desired insight. Like everyone else,
these men are still committed to objectivism. Worst of all are the new
psychological reformers, who are of the opinion that the entire fault lies in the
long-dominant atomistic prejudice, that a new era has been introduced with
wholistic psychology (Ganzheitspsychologie). There can, however, never be any
improvement so long as an objectivism based on a naturalistic focusing on the
environing world is not seen in all its na'ivetfi, until men recognize thoroughly the
absurdity of the dualistic interpretation of the world, according to which nature
and spirit are to be looked upon as realities (Realitaten) in the same sense. In all
seriousness my opinion is this: there never has nor ever will be an objective
science of spirit, an objective theory of the soul, objective in the sense that it
permits the attribution of an existence under the forms of spatio-temporality to
souls or to communities of persons.
The spirit and in fact only the spirit is a being in itself and for itself; it is
autonomous and is capable of being handled in a genuinely rational, genuinely
and thoroughly scientific way only in this autonomy ss. In regard to nature and
scientific truth concerning it, however, the natural sciences give merely the
appearance of having brought nature to a point where for itself it is rationally
known. For true nature in its proper scientific sense is a product of the spirit that
investigates nature, and thus the science of nature presupposes the science of the
spirit. The spirit is essentially qualified to exercise self-knowledge, and as
scientific spirit to exercise scientific self-knowledge, and over and over again.
Only in the kind of pure knowledge proper to science of the spirit is the scientist
unaffected by objection that his accomplishment is delf-concealing s6. As s
consequence, it is absurd for the sciences of the spirit to dispute with the
sciences of nature for equal rights. To the extent that the former concede to the
latter that their objectivity is an autonomy, they are themselves victims of
objectivism. Moreover, in the way the sciences of the spirit are at present
developed, with their manifold disciplines, they forfeit the unlimate, actual
rationality which the spiritual Weltanschauung makes possible. Precisely this
21
lack of genuine rationality on all sides is the source of what has become for man
an unbearable unclarity regarding his own existence and his infinite tasks. These
last are inseparably united in one task: only if the spirit returns to itself from its
naive exteriorization, clinging to itself and purely to itself, can it be adequate to
itself TM.
Now, how did the beginning of such a self-examination come about? A
beginning was impossible so long as sensualism, or better, a psychology of data, a
tabula rasa psychology, held the field. Only when Brentano promoted psychology
to being a science of vital intentional experiences was an impulse given that
could lead further - though Brentano himself had not yet overcome objectivism
and psychological naturalism 58. The development of a real method of grasping
the fundamental essence of spirit in its intentionalities and consequently of
instituting an analysis of spirit with a consistency reaching to the infinite, led to
transcendental phenomenology. It was this that overcame naturalistic
objectivism, and for that matter any form of objectivism, in the only possible
way, by beginning one's philosophizing from one's own ego; and that purely as
the author of all one accepts, becoming in this regard a purely theoretical
spectator. This attitude brings about the successful institution of an absolutely
autonomous science of spirit in the form of a consistent understanding of self and
of the world as a spiritual accomplishment. Spirit is not looked upon here as part
of nature or parallel to it; rather nature belongs to the sphere of spirit. Then, too,
the ego is no longer an isolated thing alongside other such things in a pregiven
world. The serious problem of personal egos external to or alongside of each
other comes to an end in favor of an intimate relation of beings in each other and
for each other.
Regarding this question of interpersonal relations, nothing can be said here; no
one lecture could exhaust the topic. I do hope, however, to have shown that we
are not renewing here the old rationalism, which was an absurd naturalism,
utterly incapable of grasping the problems of spirit that concern us most. The
ratio now in question is none other than spirit understanding itself in a really
universal, really radical manner, in the form of a science whose scope is universal,
wherein an entirely new scientific thinking is established in which every
conceivable question, whether of being, of norm, or of so-called 'existence ©,
finds its place. It is my conviction that intentional phenomenology has for the
first time made spirit as spirit the field of systematic, scientific experience, thus
effecting a total transformation of the task of knowledge. The universality of the
absolute spirit embraces all being in a absolute historicity, into which nature fits
as a product of spirit. It is intentional, which is to say transcendental
phenomenology that sheds light on the subject by virtue of its point of departure
and its methods. Only when seen from the phenomenological point of view is
naturalistic objectivism, along with the proroundest reasons for it, to be
understood. Above all, phenomenology makes clear that, because of its
naturalism, psychology simply could not come to terms with the activity and the
properly radical problem of spirit's life.
III
22
Let us summarize the fundamental notions of what we have sketched here. The
'crisis of European existence', which manifests itself in countless symptoms of a
corrupted life, is no obscure fate, no impenetrable destiny. Instead, it becomes
manifestly understandable against the background of the philosophically
discoverable 'teleology of European history'. As a presupposition of this
understanding, however, the phenomenon 'Europe' is to be grasped in its
essential core. To get the concept of what is contra-essential in the present
'crisis', the concept 'Europe' would have to be developed as the historical
teleology of infinite goals of reason; it would have to be shown how the
European 'world' was born from ideas of reason, i.e., from the spirit of
philosophy 6ø. The 'crisis' could then become clear as the 'seeming collapse of
rationalism'. Still, as we said, the reason for the downfall of a rational culture
does not lie in the essence of rationalism itself but only in its exteriorization, its
absorption in 'naturalism' and 'objectivism'.
The crisis of European existence can end in only one of two ways: in the ruin of
a Europe alienated from its rational sense of life, fallen into a barbarian hatred of
spirit; or in the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy, through a
heroism of reason that will definitively overcome naturalism. Europe's greatest
danger is weariness. Let us as 'good Europeans' do battle with this danger of
dangers with the sort of courage that does not shirk even the endless battle. If we
do, then from the annihilating conflagration of disbelief, from the fiery torrent of
despair regarding the West's mission to humanity, from the ashes of the great
weariness, the phoenix of a new inner life of the spirit will arise as the
underpinning of a great and distant human future, for the spirit alone is
immortal.
NOTES
. It is unquestionable that 'Western man' would be a happier expression in the context. Husserl, however,
speaks of europiischen Menschentums, which, as will be seen later, must be translated as 'European man' if the
rest of the text is to make sense.
2. Geisteswissenschaften: In certain contexts it will be necessary to translate this term more literally as 'sciences
of the spirit'. This will be particularly true where the term occurs in the singular. cf. p. 54 n.  and n. o infra.
3. The notion of 'horizon', which played such an important part in Husserl's earlier writings, has here taken on
a somewhat broader connotation. Formerly it signified primarily those concomitant elements in consciousness
that are given, without being the direct object of the act of consciousness under consideration. In every act of
consciousness there are aspects of the object that are not directly intended but which are recognized, either by
recall or anticipation, as belonging to the object intended. These aspects constitute its horizon. In the present
essay 'the community as a horizon' signifies the framework in which experience occurs, conditioning that
experience and supplying the diverse aspects of objectivity that are not directly intended in any one act of
consciousness.
4. I am using an expression borrowed from Dewey to translate the Husserlian Umwelt, a term Husserl uses
frequently only in his last period. In the light of the Cartesian Meditations we must remember that though such a
world is subjectively 'constituted', it is still not a private world, since its constitution is ultimately
'intersubjective'.
5. Like Kant, Husserl saw 'necessity' and 'universality' as the notes that characterize genuinely valid objectivity.
Not until his later works (Ideen II and Cartesian Meditations), however, does he explicitly see 'intersubjective
constitution' as the ultimate concrete foundation for universal objectivity.
6. Here Husserl is giving to the term 'intuition' the limited meaning of sense intuition that it has for Kant.
7. Geistigkeit: Following a decision to translate 'Geist' as 'spirit' rather than as 'mind', we are forced into a
somewhat uncomfortable translation of the present abstraction. The embarrassment becomes acute when
reference is made to the 'spirituality' of animals (cf. n. $ infra), but it is not likely that 'mentality' would be any
less embarrassing.
8. Where there is consciousness, there is spirit, and in animals there is consciousness. For Husserl, self-
consciousness is a mark of 'personality' rather than 'spirituality'.
23
9. In this connection one should consult the Second Cartesian Meditation, where Husserl insists that the only
reality that the world can have for one who would approach it scientifically is a phenomenal reality. If we are to
understand it scientifically, our analysis of it must be purely phenomenological, i.e., it is the phenomenon 'world'
that we must analyze. 'We shall direct our attention to the fact that phenomenological epoche lays open (to me,
the meditating philosopher) an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the sphere of a new kind of experience:
transcendental experience' (Cartesian Meditations, p. 66). Cf. ibid., p. 69: 'Now, however, we are envisaging a
science that is, so to speak, absolutely subjective, whose thematic object exists whether of not the world exists'.
o. Because of the context here, it is imperative that 'Geisteswissenschaft' not be translated as 'humanistic
science'.
H. From his earliest days Husserl never tired of insisting that there can be no 'natural science' of science itself. It
is the theme of Logische Untersuchungen and is perhaps most eloquently expressed in Formale und
transzendentale Logik, whose purpose is to develop a 'science of science', which, Husserl holds, can be only a
transcendental (constitutive) phenomenology.
2. Stammen: Literally the term means 'stocks', but the English word could scarcely be unambiguous in the
context.
3. Not only is Europe, according to Husserl, the birthplace of philosophy and the sciences, but it is philosophy
and the sciences that more than anything else have made European culture unique, have given it its most
distinguishing characteristic.
4. Oswald Menghin, Weltgeschichte der Steinzeit (Vienna: A. Schroll, 930.
5. The tacit beginning of all Husserl's philosophizing is the value judgement that the rational life, in the sense in
which he understands it, is the best life. But unlike Hegel, he has not excogitated a philosophy of history to
justify this judgment.
6. Nature is precisely that which does repeat constantly (despite evolution). It is characteristic of natural
species that their members follow each other in the same identifiable form. Spirit, however, is an ongoing totality,
never reaching maturity, never reproducing itself in the same form.
7. This notion of 'intentional guide', of 'clue', is developed in No 2 of the Second Cartesian Meditation. Husserl
recognizes a subjective factor - here 'anticipation' - as guiding the manner in which objects - here history itself -
are intentionally 'constituted'.
8. Husserl was never particularly concerned with historical accuracy, even in his choice of terminology. Apart
from the anachronism involved in applying the term 'nation' to the loose unities of the ancient world, 'Greek'
itself is a term that covers a somewhat heterogeneous grouping in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.
9. Despite the embarrassments involved in certain contexts, I have chosen to translate Einstellung for the most
part by 'attitude'. The German term indicates a focusing of attention in a particular way. There is no way in
English of rendering the play on words involved in the opposition of Einstellung-Umstellung, which latter is more
than a mere 'change' of attitude; 'reorientation' of attitude is more like it.
2o. This is Husserl's somewhat unwieldy way of indicating that the overall interest in being breaks down into
particular interests in types or classes of being - which are the objects of particular sciences.
2. Here, near the end of his life, Husserl retains the theme he had developed so many years earlier in
'Philosophy as Rigorous Science'. The ideal of philosophy and the particular sciences is the same; differences are
to be traced to the degree of universality involved in the one and the other. The entire book Die Krisis der
europaischen Wissenschafften is devoted to developing this theme historically.
22. Under the verbiage of this extremely difficult paragraph is hidden a profound insight into the transformation
that takes place in men when they begin to look beyond facts to ideas. The only way to describe the horizon thus
opened is to call it 'infinite'. Whether this began only with the Greeks is, of course, open to dispute. Still, the
Greeks are the intellectual first parents of Western man.
23 . With the advent of philosophical and scientific ideals history itself becomes historical in an new and more
profound sense. It is unfortunate, however, that Husserl fails to see history as the progressive concretization of
the ideal.
24 . It would seem that in terms of ideas the world scientific community is far more closely knit than is the
philosophical community. The type of unity, however, is analogous in both cases. Husserl would not like to
admit that the differences are due to essential differences in the disciplines themselves. It is questionable that the
sort of unity achieved in science is even desirable in philosophy.
25. For Husserl, truth is, so to speak, a Platonic Idea, in relation to which any particular truth is but a
participation.
26. If 'everyone' simply includes the sum total of all existing subjects, it does not have the universal significance
that Husserl demands. In the sense in which he understands it, 'universal' is inseparable from 'essential'. One is
reminded of the critics who accuse Husserl of being 'scholastic'. Cf. p. 82 supra.
27 . The attitude that pursues 'knowledge for its own sake'. It is precisely in this that the 'infinity' of the horizon
consists' there is no assignable practical goal in which its interests can terminate.
28. Here the play on words involved in Einstellung and Umstellung is impossible to render in English.
29. In Husserl's view, the beginning of a philosophical (of scientific) focusing of attention on the environing
world - as opposed to a naYve, mythical, or poetic attitude - represents the most important revolution in the
history of human thought. At the same time, he sees this revolution as continuous with previous attitudes, since
it is a transformation of them - not an elimination - something is common to the old and the new.
24
3 o. That man's Einstellung in regard to the world about him should, for Husserl, be the most of human
existence seems to imply some affinity between this position and that which Heidegger expresses by In-der-
Welt-sein. Whether Husserl was influenced by his own student in this cannot be determined (cf. Spiegelberg,
The Phenomenological Movement, I, p. 3oo). It may or may not be significant that this theme appears in
Husserl's writings only after the publication of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (9.... Time, New York: Harper & Row,
962).
3. Neither philosophy nor science nor, for that matter, any professional interest can become the exclusive
interest in any man's life. But it is true that one is designated philosopher, scientist, etc., by the predominant
interest which has an intentional continuity throughout all the occupations of his daily life.
32. In a somewhat different context the meaning of epoche here parallels its technical meaning as employed, for
example, in Ideen I. It is neither an elimination of nor a prescinding from other interests. Rather, it simply 'puts
them in brackets', thus retaining them, but allowing them in no way to influence theoretical considerations.
33. I.e., in a phenomenological essential intuition.
34. Since Husserl's philosophical life was devoted almost exclusively to the programmatic aspects of
phenomenology - getting it 'off the ground', so to speak - he found little time himself for the sort of thing he
describes here. But many of his students did. Much of the contemporary interest in Husserl, manifested in a wide
variety of areas, is due to a desire to learn how to do what Husserl suggests.
35. Aside from the fact that he knows little or nothing of Eastern thought, Husserl here repeats the arbitrariness
of 'Philosophy as Rigorous Science', where he simply decides what philosophy is (in an essential intuition, of
course) and refuses to dignify with that name whatever does not measure up.
36. Despite Husserl's insistence here and elsewhere that this is Plato's attitude, there is little justification for his
failing to recognize that Plato's purpose, even in his most 'theoretical' investigations, is eminently practical. In a
somewhat different meaning, the same can be said for Aristotle.
37. To characterize 'essentially' the 'path of motivation' from mere curiosity about the world to a universal
philosophical science of the world is, of course, extremely aprioristic. We are simply told how it must have been
(the danger of all 'essential' intuition). It remains true, however, that there is no better introduction to philosophy
than a history of the pre-Socratic attempts to know the secrets of the world - without doing anything about it.
38 . One is reminded of the contrast made by Aristotle between 'men of experience' and 'men of science'
(Metaph. A 98a). In a more striking way Socrates met this in his conflict with the 'practical' politicians of his
day.
39. Again, a phenomenological essential intuition, that says nothing regarding the 'existence' of God.
4 o. Nowhere, it seems, has Husserl developed this profound insight wherein he sees faith as a special kind of
evidence, permitting theology, too, to be a science. In different ways this is developed by Scheler in his
philosophy of religion, by Van der Leeuw and Hering in their phenomenology of religion, and by Otto in his
investigations of 'the sacred'.
4. Im Geiste der Unendlichkeit: The expression, scarcely translatable into English, bespeaks a spirit that refuses
to stop short of infinity in its pursuit of truth. In Husserl himself, one hesitates to see it as a plea for a
metaphysics, but in a Scheler, a Heidegger, a Conrad-Martius, it becomes just that; cf. Peter Wust, Die
Auferstehung der Metaphysik (Leipzig, 92o).
42. In Formale und transzendentale Logik Husserl calls philosophy the 'science of all sciences', which is to say, it
provides the norms whereby any science can be worthy of the name.
43. Husserl's constant plea has been for a return to the 'rationalism' of Socrates and Plato (cf. 'Philosophy as
Regorous Science', p. 76 supra), not to the rationalism of seventeenth - and eighteenth - century Europe. His own
inspiration, however, is traceable far more to Descartes, Hume, and Kant than to Socrates and Plato.
44. The philosophia perennis that, like a Platonic Idea, is eternally changeless amid the varying participations that
we can call 'philosophies'.
45. One is reminded of Husserl's insistence in the Cartesian Meditations (pp. 2-35 ) that a successful
phenomenological philosophy must being as solipsism, moving on to an intersubjectivity only after it has been
established on a solipsistic basis. In this Husserl once more derives his inspiration from seventeenth - and
eighteenth - century rationalism.
46 . The theme is familiar from the whole first part of 'Philosophy as Rigorous Science'.
47. Democritus, who flourished two hundred years after Thales, was a contemporary of Socrates. Thus he
belongs more properly to the 'golden age' of Greek philosophy than to the 'early stages'.
48. Regulae ad directionem ingenii, Rele . The quotation is verbally inaccurate (probably from memory), but
the sense is the same.
49. For Husserl, real has a distinctively different meaning from reell. The former is applied only to the material
world of facts; the latter belongs to the ideal world of intentionality. Cf. Ideen I, pp. 28-2o.
5o. Cf. Husserl's Encyclopaedia Britannica article, 'Phenomenology', where he develops the notion of a 'pure'
psychology independent of psychophysical considerations.
5. The play upon the word Not is impossible to render here. The situation of modern science is described as a
Notlage, which can be translated as a 'situation of distress'. By itself Not can mean 'need', 'want', 'suffering', etc.
The word is used three times, and there is a shade of difference in meaning each time it is used.
52. The work of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr has shown how quantum mechanics and nuclear physics
have high-lighted precisely the problem Husserl brings out here.
25
53. It is axiomatic for Husserl that only insight can reveal 'essences' and that only a knowledge of essences can be
ultimately scientific. That this insight should be at once intuitive and constitutive is peculiar to the Husserlian
theory of intentionality; cf. my La phenomenologie de Husserl, pp. 3-34.
54. Husserl's judgment of 'phychologism' was no less severe at the end of his life than it was when he wrote
'Philosophy as Rigorous Science'.
55. 'Dualism' and 'monism' are terms whose meanings are not easily determined. As a convinced 'idealist' Husserl
considered himself a monist, and he criticized Kant strongly for remaining a dualist. Hegel, on the other hand,
criticizes Fichte (whom Husserl resembles closely in this) for not having escaped dualism. One might well make a
case for designating as monism a theory that accepts only one kind of reality, to which both matter and spirit (of
the 'factual' and the 'ideal') belong. By this criterion Husserl's distinction would be 'dualistic'. Perhaps the best
that can be said is that Husserl is, in intention at least, epistemologically a monist. Spirit alone is being in the full
sense, because only of spirit can there be science in the full sense. One conclusion from all this, it would seem, is
that the terminology involved bears revision.
56. If the proper function of true science is to know 'essences', there seems little question that the sciences of
nature neither perform nor pretend to perform this function. If, in addition, essences are, only insofar as they are
'constituted' in consciousness (ultimately spirit), then only a science of spirit can legitimately lay claim to the title.
57. One is reminded of Hegel's dictum that when reason is conscious to itself of being all reality, it is spirit. The
difference in the paths by which Hegel and Husserl arrive at this conclusion should be obvious.
58. For his part, Brentano complained that his theory of intentionality had been transformed by Husserl into an a
priori idealism.
59. Existenz: Husserl was never particularly sympathetic to 'existentialism'. To him it smacked too mach of
irrationalism. A rational science of philosophy could only be an essentialism. In such a science, existence could be
significant only as 'possible existence'.
6o. Though Husserl's 'historical erudition' frequently leaves much to be desired, there is a profound insight here.
It is the spirit of philosophy conceived in ancient Greece that throughout the centuries has guided the intellectual
life of the West.
26