In a rather unflattering review of Marvin Farber’s 1941 edited collection Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (Husserl died in 1938), Ernest Nagel takes a few swipes at Husserl, or perhaps more precisely at Husserl’s commentators. Farber himself, as discussed in an earlier post, had studied with Husserl in Germany while a graduate student at Harvard. In 1940 he was the founding editor of the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (which he edited until 1980). With the exception of Dorion Cairns, Farber was probably the person best suited to compile a volume in honor of Husserl.
Despite Farber’s credentials, Nagel finds little that is compelling in the collection and his criticisms often mirror what will often be heard in later decades regarding continental thought. For example, Nagel expresses doubt about whether any of the papers “will be either intelligible or persuasive to any one not previously instructed in Husserl’s ideas or convinced of their importance” (301); and, more damningly, he argues that with few exceptions Husserl’s views are not “expressed in recognizable English,” with “such barbarisms as ‘presuppositionless,’ ‘insightful,’ ‘pre-givenness’ or ‘the itself-giving’” (ibid.) being thrown around in a way that leaves novitiates at a loss to understand their meaning.
Adding to the recent discussions of Eric (here), Catarina (here), and Mohan (here) regarding the use and significance (or lack thereof) of intuition in analytic philosophy, one obvious place to turn to where intuition does appear to loom large is the work of Husserl. Husserl’s work, however, was also an important source of inspiration for Gödel’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, and thus it bleeds significantly into a number of problems within the analytic tradition.
According to Hao Wang (in A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy), Gödel had spent much of the years from 1943 to 1958 attempting to develop a philosophy of mathematics that would serve, as Wang put it, “both as a prolegomenon to metaphysics and as a relatively precise part of general philosophy” (76). Much of this work was an effort to provide the philosophical justification for his conceptual realism and to challenge the Carnapian tendency to hold “the view,” citing Gödel, “that mathematics is syntax of language” (ibid.).
Wang claims that by 1958 Gödel was satisfied that he had shown, in an unpublished essay on Carnap, that “mathematics is not syntax of language, [but] he had not made clear what mathematics is” (80). This led Gödel to the conclusion “that philosophy was harder and more different from science than he had expected,” and it led him to a lengthy and detailed study of Husserl – especially Husserl’s theory of “categorial intuition” as developed in the Logical Investigations and in other works (especially Cartesian Meditations). It is in this work where Gödel felt he had found a possible path towards resolving his difficulties in justifying conceptual realism.
The Husserlian emphasis upon “categorial intuition,” however, seems to be precisely what bothers Nagel, for the “barbarisms” Nagel complains of, especially the “itself-giving,” are crucial to Husserl’s understanding of categorial intuition, or originary "self-giving" as Husserl discusses it (barbarically of course!).
Take Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry” for instance. In his review Nagel takes issue with Jacob Klein’s contribution (“Phenomenology and the History of Science”). While Nagel agrees that “a historical-genetic account of science can be illuminating and clarifying [as] is shown by the writings of such men as Mach and Duhem,” he adds that “it is not clear how the psychological (or phenomenological) analysis which Dr. Klein suggests does bear upon the nature and history of geometry or how it contributes to the solution of the concrete problems connected with the use of geometry in the natural sciences” (303).
As Klein makes clear in his essay, however, Husserl’s approach is not a psychological approach but rather an attempt to better understand and legitimize an “ideal objectivity,” or a conceptual realism of they type Gödel himself sought to establish, and to do so without relying upon a psychological approach. Moreover, Klein stresses that “in attacking ‘psychologism’,” Husserl necessarily encountered “the problem of ‘history’” (143).
In other words, to avoid a “psychologistic” and “historicist” account of geometry, Husserl calls for a “regressive inquiry” (158) that begins with a ready-made geometry as an established tradition and moves back (i.e., regresses) -- by way of what Husserl calls a “depth-inquiry which goes beyond the usual factual history” (175) -- in order to restore the original meaning and “self-evidence” that is the “historical a priori which encompasses everything that exists as historical becoming and having-become or exists in its essential being as tradition and handing-down” ("Origin of Geometry" 174).
It is this move that Nagel is suspicious of. As Nagel argues in his review, no reason is given as to why “there is one fundamental ‘deep’ level upon which all knowledge must ultimately be founded, and that the phenomenological technique does penetrate to this depth—claims which are as debatable as they are obscure” (302).
Husserl’s regressive “depth-inquiry” is not without its critics within the continental tradition. Derrida, for example, argues that by relying upon written language in order to account for how the “ideal objectivity” of geometry emerges from its “primary intrapersonal" origin, Husserl ultimately undermines his very attempt to establish the “univocity” and “identity” of self-giving meaning (this is one of the main points of Derrida's 1962 Introduction to Husserl's 'Origin of Geometry').
Whatever one makes of Derrida’s reading of Husserl, there are some takeaways and a question regarding Nagel’s review and the continental/analytic divide that I’d like to end with. First the takeaways:
- Although Nagel accepts that some form of historical inquiry may indeed be helpful (note his praise of Mach and Duhem), it is not essential to grasping the meaning or practice of science in its current state. For Husserl, by contrast, to grasp the given state of science it is essential to engage in a regressive analysis and “depth-inquiry” in order to recover the original self-evidence upon which the historical tradition and current practice is founded.
- Despite significant differences with Husserl, Heidegger’s emphasis upon etymology and the history of philosophy, Foucault’s archaeology/genealogy, and Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism are each in their own ways different attempts to engage in a similar form of “depth-inquiry.”
- Both Husserl (and Gödel) believe that there is an “ideal objectivity” within geometry and mathematics that maintains the same “identical intersubjective meaning” as it gets handed down through the historical tradition. Coupled with this is Husserl’s accompanying belief (although not Gödel’s in this instance as far as I know) that the method best suited for realizing such “identifiable” meanings involves a process of difference and variation. Through the process of “free variation” where we run through “the conceivable possibilities for the life-world,” Husserl argues that we discover, “with apodictic self-evidence, an essentially general set of elements going through all the variants” (177).
- While Husserl would argue (and here I think Nagel would agree) that the process of continuous variation is subservient to the identities that are the true “historical a priori,” for Deleuze (and Derrida and Foucault on my reading) it is difference and continuous variation that is the historical a priori for identity. Deleuze, for example (h/t to John) follows Simondon in accounting for the individuation of identities by extending and generalizing Simondon's discussion of crystallization as a process that does not presuppose identities but rather involves differentials and thresholds that trigger the individuation of identity (see this post for more). Alternatively (h/t to Joe Hughes) one can think of this process in terms of group theory as a set of unsolved problems rather than as a process that presupposes individuated objects (Quentin Meillassoux has been pushing this point as well [see here]). Or one can think of it in Humean terms as I have argued.
And now to the question:
If Gödel turned to Husserl in order to develop his conceptual realism, and if this entails taking the problem of history head on, then Nagel’s critical review can be seen as being in part motivated by a desire to move philosophical analyses away from the regressive, historical type pursued by Husserl towards the type of ahistorical analysis one finds in Carnap.
To what extent then might Gödel’s critique of Carnap, therefore, become in turn a defense of Husserl’s approach to philosophy (and by extension Deleuze et al.)? And as a follow up, what would be the differential processes and thresholds that would account for the individuation of "ideal objectivities"?