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Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Western Science
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14425 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
3,480 Words |
| Author
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Thomas Molnar
Thomas Molnar is professor of religion at Yale. He is the
author of The Pagan Temptation; The Decline of the
Intellectual; Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time; and God and
Knowledge of Reality. |
During the nineteenth century, numerous thinkers devoted much of their speculative efforts to the quest of building a new world order. The orientation toward an ideal state of affairs achieved through science or by a scientific morality began with the Renaissance; before then it had been, if anything, a sporadic enterprise. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the medieval Christian worldview had dramatically eroded; perhaps the first to adumbrate it was Nicholas of Cusa, credited with the phrase: "The center (of the world) is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." Ever since, philosophers and scientists have tried to formulate a substitute religion, or at least a plausible belief system through which man could again find his own place. Hence the proliferation of "utopias" and "new worlds" for about four centuries. Even the nineteenth century was optimistic about a new religion and a new order of things: Auguste Comte, a representative figure of the age, was convinced that he had built, with positivism, the foundation of an edifice containing scientific laws and a credo consecrating them as eternal truths; he propounded this view in his "Positivist Catechism."
Toward the end of the last century, the utopian assumptions began to change, and new evaluations were made by some unpopular minds, or, some would say, revisionist philosophers. Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche turned away from the totem pole of progress. While three or four centuries of utopian thought had branched out widely in search of a new world, the nineteenth century believed that all energy had to be gathered for the adoration of science, the designated chief instrument for the creation of a perfect state of affairs. Perfect, because the scientists knew now how to measure progress and how to predict its future course.
The few "reactionaries" who lived during the zenith of scientific-utopian optimism lived long enough to see the commencing of its twilight. They spoke a language that few understood; it was practically in code, almost like the "Aesopian" script under today's totalitarian regimes. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wee masters at concealing their real thoughts not because they feared the fashionable dandies of the universities, but because they knew that their meaning would not be grasped. Their style was therefore a kind of poetry because, as two other antiprogressives a century earlier, Vico and Heerder, had suggested, new gods arise and are announced through the imagination of poets. What the poets of the twilight and of coming gods (in Kierkegaard's case, the Christian God) knew was that entire walls were collapsing in the vaultless edifice of Western modernity. Nietzsche must have been aware that he was shaking
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