Husserl Studies 2:129-155 (1985]. © 1985 Martinus NijhoffPublishers, Dordrecht. Printed in the Netherlands.

Jan Pato~ka, Edmund Husserl's philosophy of the crisis of science and his conception of a phenomenology of the "'life.world"

Translated and introduced by ERAZIM KOHAK Boston University

I. Introduction: Jan Patoc~ka's search for the natural world

When Jan Pato~ka died at the hands of the Czechoslovak secret police in 1977, just short of his seventieth birthday, he was probably one of Europe's most respected, most loved and least known philosophers. Over the years, he had won the friendship and affection of most of the leading figures of European philosophy, acknowledged in 1977 with a generous Festschrif t . His occasional papers and articles in French and German earned him the reputation of an erudite scholar and an original thinker, acknowledged in 1972 by an honorary doctorate from the University of Aachen. The bulk of his work, however, remained in- accessible in his native Czech, behind a wall of censorship, and often "published" only in samizdat - sheaves of lovingly handbound, barely legible carbon copies. Like the Presocratics to whom he devoted so much attention, Pato~ka remained a philosopher known only through fragments of his work.

In the last few years, however, this has begun to change. Though Pato~ka's name remains on the index in Czechoslovakia, his former students have prepared a typescript edition of his Collected Works, with some copies reaching the West. In West Germany, Milan Walter has prepared a painstakingly complete bibliography in German and, in the U.S., Josef Novfik a concise one in English, both scheduled for early publication. In France, Erika Abrams has prepared and published several of Pato~ka's works in French, with more to come - the first volume included a preface by Paul Ricoeur and a postface by Roman Jakobson. A large volume of Selected Works will, I hope, follow in English. In Germany, the Klett-Cotta Verlag has announced a series of

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German translations, with the first volume due out in autumn of 1985. Most of all, the lnstitut fiir die Wissenschaften vom Mensehen in Vienna has assembled an almost complete archive of Pato6ka's writings, from obscure reviews from the late 1920's down to posthumously circulated writings from the 1970's. It is at long last becoming possible to form a conception of the coherence and the continuity of Jan Pato6ka's thought.

Future scholars might well come to regard Pato~ka as a Husserl scholar and the most persistent of Husserl's successors. Ever since the first encounters with Husserl, in Paris in 1929 and Freiburg in 1933, Pato6ka remained deeply committed to Husserl's project, excited by it, frustrated by its failures, ever returning to it. His earliest works deal with Husserl - as Po]em evidence ("The Concept of Evidence," 1930); P~irozen~ sv~t jako filosofick~ problem ("The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem," 1936); "Masarykovo a Husserlovo pojetf du~evni krise evropsk6ho lidstva" ("Masaryk's and Husserl's Conception of the Spiritual Crisis of European Humankind," 1937). Over the years - as in the text that follows - Pato6ka became convinced of the in- adequacy of Husserl's approach, and yet he could not leave it alone. The paper on which he was working at the time of his death was to have borne the title "Husserlova transcenden~ilni filosofie po revisi" (Husserl's transcendental philosophy after revision; incomplete outline, 1977). It opens with an assertion and a question: "Transcendental philosophy cannot sustain its claim to absolute grounding ... does that mean the end of phenomenology? of transcental philosophy?" The answer was clearly to be NO. When Patoc"ka's writings about Husserl finally appear in a Western language, it might well prove a major event in Husserlian scholarship.

And yet it would be misleading to present Pato6ka as primarily a Husserl scholar. Though deeply indebted to Husserl, Patoc"ka's thought has a coherence and a continuity of its own, enabling Pato6ka to integrate thinkers as different as Aristotle, Comenius, Masaryk or Heidegger and to speak to topics as different as philosophy of history, intellectual history, the history of science as well as phenomenology and, in a post-Heideggerean sense, metaphysics.

The coherence focuses on three interlocking conceptions, that of philosophy, of crisis and Of the natural world. Philosophy, as Patoc"ka understood and lived it, is not simply a descriptive or speculative enter- prise. Though it is dedicated to thought, the task of that thought is

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more urgent - spoken with Socrates (Sokrates, 1946), it is to enable humans not only to live, but to live well. In an early text, "O sv~tsk6 a mimosv~tsk6 posici filosofie" ("The Worldly and the Otherworldly Position of Philosophy," 1934), Patoc"ka speaks of philosophy as a vocation, not of this world, calling humans to what he later comes to call the life in truth. In a much later text, "K prehistorii vedy o pohybu" ("The Prehistory of the Science of Movement," 1965), he elaborates this theme in terms of the three "movements" of human life, that of gaining a world, that of sustaining ourselves in the world - and that of transcending this world into a life no longer enclosed with- in its needs and their satisfaction, but deriving its meaning from a vision of truth. Philosophy is for PatocVka both the call to truth and the re- sponse to it. It is almost as if Patoc"ka, the son of a convinced atheist, sought in philosophy the liberating call, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven," that Christian believers encounter in their faith. Hence the note of urgency in his thought and life: philosophy cannot simply speculate - it must transform the very being of humans with a vision of the Good. Or, more precisely, though the task of philosophy is to understand the world, not to change it, the understanding must be one that leads humans to the full stature of their humanity.

For philosophy so conceived, the theme of crisis becomes meaning- ful. Were the life of humans merely a fact, so would evil be. Evil be- comes a crisis when we conceive of human life as a task, and of evil as something that not simply is, but rather threatens the realization of life's true potential. In one study, "Prirodzeny svet a fenomenol6gia" ("The Natural World and Phenomenology," 1967), Patoc"ka traces this conception to Kant's separation of the inner realm of practical reason from the phenomenal world described by the sciences, postponing the task of their reconciliation to an indefinite future prolonged into im- mortality. In the Czech thought of the time, however, the sense of crisis was far less abstract. Its stage was the historical optimism of the nine- teenth century which Patoc"ka, in "Masarykovo a Husserlovo pojeti du~veni krize evropsk6ho lidstva" ("Masaryk's and Husserl's Concep- tion of the Spiritual Crisis of European Humanity," 1936), as well as in numerous other texts, down to Dv~ studie o Masarykovi ("Two Studies About Masaryk," 1976), links with positivism and Masaryk - the convic- tion of a fundamental harmony between the personal growth of each human to moral maturity and the "objective" development of Euro- pean civilization to social maturity; social progress matching human

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growth. It was Masaryk who, already in the 1870's, warned that the disturbing phenomena of the time, symbolized for him by the tendency to murder and suicide, are not marginal imperfections but evidence of a deep-rooted disharmony between moral and social development, and so a sign of a crisis.

Though Jan Pato~ka's interpretation of the cause of the crisis was radically different from Masaryk's, he felt the sense of crisis no less keenly - of a fundamental disharmony between objective social develop- ment and the growth to life in truth to which philosophy calls us. The world as we have come to understand it has become alien to our authentic self-understanding. We see around us the world as the correlate of natural sciences, we have lost sight of the world as the correlate of moral acts. Hence the third theme of Pato6ka's thought, that of the search for the natural world. The crisis is the loss of grounding in lived experience, the task of philosophy one of rediscovering it, recovering the "natural" world of our lives, our Lebenswelt, capable of providing a secure grounding both for our sciences and for our moral acts. That is the task that Pato~ka sets for himself in Prfirozen~ svet ]ako filosofick~ problem ("The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem," 1936) and which continues to occupy him in his closing years, as in the text appearing below.

These three themes, philosophy as a calling to a life in truth, the in- humanity of "progress" as a crisis, and the search for the natural world as a response, together define the coherence of Pato6ka's thought. Its continuity is one of a developing conception of this basic core, most especially of the search for the natural world. Patoc"ka rejects Masaryk's reading from the start, in what might be a classic case of misunderstand- ing. It is Husserl, specifically the Husserl of Crisis, that provides Patoc"ka with the diagnosis and the cure throughout the pre-war years. The prob- lem is the ontological significance we have attributed to the constructs of our sciences, the solution is to be sought in a radical bracketing that gives us access to the apodictic certainty of primordial, prereflective experience. At this stage, the problem appears as a conceptual one, and so a conceptual solution seems adequate. Though Patoc~ka clearly con- siders the search for the life-world rather than the quest of the transcen- dental ego central to Husserl's insight, his prewar work remains fun- damentally Husserlian.

The tragedy of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement of 1938 deeply affected Pato6ka's thought. Suddenly, the problem was no longer simply a conceptual one. Our age was losing not only its vision

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of the authentic life world, but its substance as well: a cultural extinc- tion had become a possibility. Thus the answer, too, cannot remain simply conceptual but must turn to the very experiential core of our being and its social counterpart. In a number of texts from this period, as "~esk~ vzd~lanost v Evrop~" ("Czech Culture in Europe," 1939), "Dvoji rozum a p~iroda v n6meckEm osviceni" ("The Two Senses of Reason and Nature in the German Enlightenment," 1942)or "Symbol zem~ u K.H. M~ichy" ("The Earth as Symbol in K.H. M~icha," 1944), the framework remains essentially Husserlian. Still after the war, in "Pochybnost i o eksistencialismu" ("Doubts about Existentialism," 1946), Patoc"ka mentions Heidegger only as one of the extentialists, along with Jaspers, Marcel and Sartre. For himself, he continues to see the quest, with Husserl, as one for a secure grounding of knowledge and, with the Husserl of the Krisis, seeks that grounding in a redis- covery of the primordially given "natural" life-world, understood as the correlate of ordinary experience much as, in Ideen H, Husserl described our world construct as the Korrelat der Naturwissenschaften.

Still, there is a shift from PatoEka's prewar reading, clearly outlined in "D~jepis filosofie a jeji jednota" ("The History of Philosophy and the Unity of Philosophy," 1942). As Patoc"ka now sees it, what triggers the search for a natural world is not simply a conceptual problem in the history of ideas, but rather a confrontation with our own finitude, and the focus of that search is not simply the pure Ego and his life world but a communi ty of humans and its cultural achievements, a theme continuous with the third part of Ideen 11. Even though Patoc"ka explicitly rejects the notion of the world as the achievement - Leistung

- of a transcendental subjectivity, the theme lingers: the cultural achievement, expressing a fundamental human possibility, has become something more than subjective.

It was this latter conviction - together with the practical need of providing texts for the newly reopened Czech universities - that led Patoc"ka to undertake a thorough examination of that achievement in the Western philosophical heritage. The product was a series of books devoted to the Presocratics, to Socrates, to Plato, and finally to Aris- totle (1946-48) - the son of a classics teacher, Patoc"ka was himself no mean classicist. Here, as Patoc"ka was to acknowledge later, the perspec- tive is strongly Heideggerean, even though, as if to dissociate himself from the more problematic aspects of Heidegger's political thought, then fresh in memory, PatoEka also wrote a series of articles in which

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he returns to the tradition of Czech moral humanism in Masaryk, R~idl and even the last pre-Communist president, Beneg (1946-48). That is a tradition, reaching back through Bolzano to Comenius, in which Husserl, a friend and fellow-student of Masaryk's, was also deeply rooted - he had been born in Prost~jov in Moravia and on numerous occasions, as in an unpublished 1936 letter, writes of Czechoslovakia as his homeland. For Czech readers, a volume made up of Patoc"ka's writings on Masaryk and humanism would be a major contribution. An- other volume, made up of his writings on ancient philosophy in a trans- lation into a world language, would be significant for all philosophical readers.

Unfortunately, no such volume could appear at the time. Less than three years after the war, a Soviet-sponsored Communist regime seized power in Czechoslovakia and imposed the stringent monopoly of ideology which Patoc"ka had anticipated in an earlier article, "Ideologie a ~ivot v idei" ("Ideology and Life in Idea," 1946). The doors slammed shut: the new regime surrounded the country with a triple tier of barbed wire with watch towers as well as with a wall of censorship. Pa to~a found himself dismissed from the University and assigned to a clerical position in the archive of the surviving Masaryk Institute - though the result of his work there, the monograph, Masaryk in the Struggle against Antisemitism, though titled in conformity with the propagandistic style of the time, could not be published. After the Masaryk Institute was dissolved, Patoc"ka was assigned to the Comenius archives of the Pedagogic Institute. For over ten years, he was to devote his work to the thought of the 17th century thinker, Jan Amos Ko- menskp-Comenius.

Patoc~ka's work on Comenius is of major importance for Comenius scholars and for historians of ideas in his period. In effect, it revolu- tionized the prevailing conception of Comenius who had been regarded simply as a pedagogue and a less interesting offshoot of the Cartesian- Galilean conceptual revolution. Pato~a, in a series of detailed investi- gations published here and there as the opportunity presented itself, in Czech, German and, in one case, in Latin, showed that Comenius pre- sented a neoplatonic alternative to the Galilean conception of the cosmos and so represents a link in an alternative tradition in the philos- ophy of science, reaching from Nicholas of Cusa to Goethe. The work is important for another reason as well: it provides significant historical depth to the outline of the crisis of science and of its crucial turn in

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Galileo and Descartes that Husserl sketched in his Krisis. Altogether, though specialized, the work of this period is by no means negligible, and the German language edition planned by Prof. Schaller and the Comenius Institute in Bochum should prove of considerable interest.

Still, the greatest significance of PatoEka's Comeniana might prove to be that for the development of his own thought. As Patoc"ka noted quite early, in "Dvoji filosofov~ni mlad6ho Komensk6ho" ("The Two Modes of Philosophising in the Young Comenius," 1953), Comenius foreshadows the problems raised by Husserl far more than he reflects those that concerned Galileo. The human, as Comenius understands him, is a pilgrim, homeless in an estranged world, searching for a secure ground - the familiar problem of the crisis and of the search for the "natural" world. There are, however, two ways open to him. In the consolatory writings of the early years of the Thirty Years' War, the pilgrim turns inward, to his inner resources - to the "paradise of the heart" amid the "labyrinth of the world." In later writings, however, Comenius has him turn not inward but rather outward, to a radically different conception of the world, in a search of a vision of reconcilia- tion and harmony. Patoc"ka anticipated this difference already in his "Pozn~mky o rozporu" ("Comments about Contradiction," 1943) in which he opposes a neoplatonic reading of contradiction as of a chal- lenge to seek a deeper harmony to the Aristotelian reading of it as a basic law of thought.

In his years of labor over Comenius, Patoc"ka became clearly aware of these two alternatives which were to mark his thought in the final period of his life. That period begins in the mid-1960's, when a political thaw in Czechoslovakia enabled Patoc"ka to return to the Philosophical Institute and, subsequently, even to the University, and opened him access to print. The years that followed proved immensely productive. Patoc"ka published at first texts based on the work of the silent years, as Aristoteles, jeho p~edchf~dci a d~dicovd ("Aristotle, his Predecessors and Successors," 1964). Then, increasingly, he brought out new philo- sophical works in which he returned to the three themes, philosophy as a vocation, the crisis of culture, and the search for the "natural" world, though now enriched by the experience and the study of thirty years.

Chronologically, the works of Patoc"ka's final period could be divided into three stages - the period of open publication in Czechoslovakia, lasting from the mid 'sixties to the reimposition of censorhip in the wake of the Soviet occupation, the interim years in the early 'seventies,

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when Patoc"ka could not publish at home but was able to do so abroad, writing on topics of general philosophical interest in German and in French (the text appearing below comes from this period), and the final years, when the flowering of samizdat publishing gave him an un- censored opportunity of writing for a home audience, albeit a rather limited one.

A more interesting differentiation, though, might be between the two emphases that emerge, never quite reconciled, in the thought of all three periods. Somewhat misleadingly, we might label one "Husserl- ian," the other "Heideggerean," though neither label is quite accurate. It might be better to relate them to the two emphases of Comenius' thought, the hope of a "natural" world that can be found by an "open" soul and the falling back on the soul's own resources, though even that is not quite accurate. The contrast is essentially one between the writings of the relatively hopeful times in that turbulent period, in which Pato6ka reverts to the hope of a discovery of a "natural" world by a purified soul, and the writings of the periods of deep discourage- ment, as in the wake of the Soviet occupation, when the "natural" world appears wholly at odds with actuality, as something that must be forged by the decision of the "community of the shaken," chal- lenged by the confrontation with sacrifice - echoing the self-immola- tion of Jan Palach - for a life in truth.

It is the latter emphasis that predominates in the samizdat writings of Pato~ka's final years, including his very Heideggerean Kaci~skk eseje o filosofii d~jin ("Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History," 1975), the one work that has been translated into several languages (French, Italian, Norvegian, individual chapters into English). Here Patoc"ka con- fronts the crushing divergence between moral growth and social devel- opment with an almost Promethean defiance. There is here none of the hope of a "natural" world that could be "found." It has to be created, in defiance of a hostile reality, by a community of humans whom precisely hopelessness has freed of the labyrinth of the world. Just as in the other major text of that period, DrY studie o Masarykovi ("Two Studies about Masaryk," 1976), Pato6ka here gives up any hope of a convergence of moral growth and social development, labeling all such hope as "positivism," even in Masaryk, who was certainly no more a positivist than Husserl, and opts for the defiant courage of the com- munity of those who have given up the hope of this world in order to respond to a different call.

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For all the difference from Patoc"ka's earlier writings, this position does not really contradict the humanism Pato~ka shared with Husserl and Masaryk - and with which he was to imbue Charta 77. In what for the Czechs was a period of blackest despair, when all the "objective" grounds for hope seemed to dissolve, Pato~ka provided an invaluable service in offering an alternative grounding for our humanistic vision in a personal decision. Long range, such a reading might prove untenable. At the time, though, it was crucially important, just as Comenius' consolatory writings amid the devastation that followed the Czech defeat at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620.

Still, it would be most unfortunate if we were to take this work, written from a very specific perspective for a very specific situation, as normative for Pato~ka's thought as a whole. It emphatically is not. The dominant strand, as in Comenius, is the second one, that of the search for and so also a hope of the "natural" world. It is there in a remark- able text, "Kulhav~ poutnik Josef ~apek" ("The Limping Pilgrim Josef (~apek," 1964), in which he writes of the problem of the age of human- ism as that of "man simultaneously within nature and overcoming nature, intelligible from within the world, yet at the same time bestow- ing meaning and explaining the world" (TvSf, Vol. 1, No. 9-10 (1964), pp. 9-16; my tr.), and raises the possibility of "the poetic vision of nature" as pointing to a resolution. Remarkably, in his critique of the inward turn here Pato~ka uses the term "subjectivism," a Masaryk trademark. This second strand is present in Pato~ka's "open soul" articles of 1970 and again in the text on which he was working at the time of his death. In it, he returns to the Husserlian quest for a more than subjective phenomenology. Both strands of Patofika's thought are real, yet if we consider Pato~ka's work as a whole, it is definitely the "Husserlian" strand that is more consistent and dominant.

Were the two strands ever fully reconciled? In theory, probably not. Patoc"ka died before he could write his projected systematic work on Husserl (though we have a promise of it in (Jvod do studia Husserlovy fenomenologie ("Introduction to the Study of Husserl's Phenomenol- ogy," 1966). Still, there is a reconciliation in practice. In January 1977, Pato~ka chose to take part, perhaps the initiative, in founding a human rights movement that would openly call on the regime to observe at least the laws it itself had promulgated. The regime responded with an outburst of fury. Pato~ka, then just short of his seventieth birthday, was detained and "interrogated" until, on March 13th, he died of a

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brain hemorrage. Still, in a series of short texts written in the last weeks of his life, Patoc"ka made it clear that he regarded that free association, which adopted the name of Charta 77, as the communi ty of the shaken which takes a defiant stand amid the disintegration of its time with a decision for a life in truth. Yet Charta 77 did not simply proclaim its determination. It invoked human rights, a conception of a moral law whose kinship with earlier Czech thinkers, with R~idl, with Masaryk - and with Husserl - is unmistakeable. The decision is necessary, but it is not a decision that creates a moral reality but one that realizes it. That is the reconciliation, and it is consistent with what Patoc"ka had been writing ever since he first broached the topic in an early polemical piece, "Platonism a politika" ("Platonism and Politics," 1933).

In spite of the difference in emphasis between the two strands of Patoc"ka's thought in his late years - where the Heretical Essays repre- sent the extreme overstatement of one strand - there is a fundamental consistency in Pa to~a ' s thought, as working out the theme of the search for the "natural" world that Husserl raised in his Krisis, a con- sistency that stands out unmistakeably when we consider his work as a whole.

That, though, is currently the problem. For reasons that had to do more with the vicissitudes of history than with philosophy, Patoc"ka never wrote a major systematic work. Or, more precisely, he wrote several of them, but always in the form of a series of scattered articles and monographs, closely bound together by a consistency of topic and a continuity of treatment, but never bound by a common binding and cover. There is, in his work, potentially a book on Husserl's phenom- enology, another one about ancient philosophy, perhaps one about the nature of philosophy and of its history, definitely a book about the "natural" world as well as, of local interest, a book about Comenius and about Czech national identity. They wait, though, to be assembled out of the materials already available in the Patoc~'ka Archive of Vienna's Institut fi~r die ICissenschaften vom Menschen. If and when they appear in a world language, it seems not unlikely that Patoc~ka will take his place among the major figures of European philosophy in our century.

The text appearing below is that of a lecture which Patoc"ka delivered at a conference in Warsaw in May, 1971. He lectured in French, and a French text appeared in the Warsaw journal, Archiwum historiL filozo- fii i ray~li spo]eczne], Vol. 18 (1972), pp. 3-18. In preparing the English

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version, I compared the French with the Czech text on file in Vienna. I found no substantive discrepancies; in the cases of stylistic ones, I have, for the most part, followed the Czech phrasing, since Czech (and, in part, German) was the language in which Pato~ka thought, so that the French text, even had it been written before the Czech, would still be a translation of a thought in Czech. The text appears here with the per- mission of the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the copy- right holder for all foreign language editions of Patoc"ka's writings, and with the generous support of the Institute and of Boston University.

II. Edmund Husserl's philososphy of the crisis of science and his conception of a phenomenology of the "life-world'.'

Shortly before the war, Husserl became involved with the problem of the spirit of Europe, its roots, its present condition and its future possi- bilities. He believed firmly in Europe's special, even privileged mission in behalf of all humankind.

Husserl based this faith on a basically idealistic philosophy which considers the world an achievement, a Leistung, of a fundamental inter- subjectivity, operating within an orderly experience to which things reveal their being, which, in its essence, is reason. As Husserl sees it, what makes Europe special is precisely the fact that reason constitutes the central axis of its history. There are numerous cultural traditions, but only the European places the universality of evidence - and so of proof and of reason - at the very centre of its aspirations. The vision of living in truth, of living, as Husserl has it, "responsibly," emerged only in Europe and only here did it develop in the form of a continuous thought, capable of being universally duplicated and of being deepened and corrected through a shared effort.

This magnificient tradition, stemming from the thinkers of Greek antiquity, was revived in modern times by new, original motifs that gave it greater force and scope still. The central achievement of the Greek spirit had been the creation of a rational science, especially of mathematics, and of a philosophy that examined the conditions of the possibility of a thought that could give account of each of its steps. Modern European thought built up an universal science and a technol- ogy based upon it. At the same time, at least in its beginnings, it con- ceived of the ideal of a radical philosophical grounding of all such rational knowledge.

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Thus while the Greeks managed to found islands of rational thought, capable of accounting for one of its regions, amid a sea of naively pre- sented reality, modern thought laid a claim to an entire land-mass of rationality and sought to found one single whole of unified knowledge, embracing all without exception. While Greek geometry revolves around certain privileged forms and relations, the modern age from the start lays a claim to subsuming all forms, achieving a universality devoid of privileged instances.

This spectacular outburst at the start of the modern age was, as we are all aware, crowned with imposing theoretical and practical achieve- ments. Thanks to the universalization of modern reason, rational science has become an unequalled force in human hands. Then how, given these circumstances, can we explain the fact that, for the most part, Husserl's contemporaries lost their faith in reason? Why did they turn away from what for so long had been the essence o f Europe's depth and profundity? Science has become the authori ty in every realm; we could no longer exist without it. Yet reason, its foundation, no longer attracts us, no longer appears to us as the key to the cosmos. Men are turning to something different, to action which casts off reason's yoke. It could, of course, be pointed out that these considera- tions date back to 1935, a time when irrationalism was reaching its peak. Since the irrationalism of that age has become irrelevant and no longer exists, we might question the relevance of Husserl's inquiry. It is true that that irrationalism somehow evaporated amid the storms of our time. Yet has the faith in reason as Husserl understood it been restored? Surely it has not. That is why none of Husserl's works attracted as much interest in the post-war years as his Crisis o f European Sciences .... in which he expounds his views. In the wake of the war, we all had to ask about the origins of the catastrophe in which Europe lost its pre- dominance. Husserl's work, that, already before the fact, called atten- tion to the crisis of European reason - which, though losing none of its theoretical and practical effectiveness, has begun to lose its essential foundation, its existential significance, its inner justification and its profound truth - acquired an importance which its author could not have foreseen. The important distinction between science, that doubly efficacious work of reason, and reason in its existential and meta- physical role, which is also the vital source of science, constitutes one of the dominant and most attractive themes of that work.

This is not the first time that Husserl introduces this fundamental

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distinction between science as the fruit of a striving to ground every theoretical formulation on the evidently given - possible only by tracing each formula to its very origins - and science as a theoretically and practically successful techn'& Already his first theoretical text, the Philosophy of Arithmetic, contains numerous criticisms of thinkers who devote themselves entirely to constructing abstract theories, per- mitting us to deal with higher order problems, yet neglect all analysis of fundamental concepts, down to their primordial components, given ab solo. Then they easily fall prey to the temptat ion of misinterpreting symbolic procedures which are useful and indispensible in practice but whose original meaning has been lost. The nominalist theory of num- bers, elaborated by Helmholtz and Kronecker, can serve as an example of such a procedure. The transition from an originary intuition to a formalization in symbols, however necessary and fruitful, then be- comes an occasion for basic errors, hidden behind the elegance of formal results and left unnoticed. The first part of Logical Investiga- tions, entitled "Prolegomena to a Pure Logic," once again offers the typical differentiation, pointing in the same direction. In § 9, Husserl distinguishes, among methodological procedures, between real proofs and the auxiliary apparatus which includes on the one hand shorthand expressions and symbolic substitutes for actual proofs, and, on the other, the devising of means which serve, prepare and facilitate the proofs. The most important expositions in the second half o f Logical Investigations focus precisely on the at tempt to clarify the relation between symbolic thought as a significative but " e mp t y" intention and its "fulfi lment." This theme, which lies at the origin of so many of Husserl's theories - as for instance of the idea of intentionality which intends "the same" under different modes of givenness, or of his theory of categorial and eidetic intuition - did not cease to occupy Husserl even in his last work. The admirable trait of HusserI's thought, reflect- ing on apparent "trivialities" which, precisely because they are too ordinary, remain unthematized and unseen, stands out here in its full scope.

Understandably, the turn of modern thought which began with the Renaissance, its exceptionally fruitful and general methods accom- panied by a formalization carried to ever more radical consequences, all that offers also an uncommonly seductive occasion for inauthentic interpretations. A thought which cuts itself off from its intuitive con- tents and casts them aside does not lose its effectiveness and can still

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lead to most interesting results. As an elementary example, we all can carry out valid operations using various types of "numbers" without being aware of the real meaning of the constructs we use when we speak of negative, irrational or imaginary numbers. Then we are tempted to accept those positive results as a warrant for the dubious theories we build up to explain the nature of our procedures because we lack a genuine fundamental analysis.

Husserlian theory of modern science is nothing other than a reflec- tion on the perils of fruitfulness, on the ruses of genius, on the irration- ality which rationality itself engenders - not, to be sure, necessarily, yet not wholly accidentally, either. (Might not this shadowy side of rationality, this negative aspect of science, lie at the roots of certain specific evils that not only occasioned the catastrophe that Husserl thought to prevent with his reflections but that, unfortunately, are also still very much with us?)

We might formulate Husserl's thoughts on philosophy, science and rationality roughly as follows. Science is genuinely a science - rational- ly grounded and internally clear knowledge - only as long as it remains in close contact with philosophy which is its starting point and its foundation. Philosophy is nothing other than a life (dedicated to thought) which responds to the call for a fully responsible thought. An att i tude o f responsibility is one which makes its opinions conform to its in-tuitions of the matters themselves, not inversely. We can see that only such a responsible att i tude makes possible the life in truth which is the essence of philosophy and of every science that has not lost touch with it. Life in truth, in turn, is rationality. This life in truth, as the characteristic bios, is what the ancient Greeks had founded as an on- going tradition whose meaning is always capable of being rediscovered, renewed and enriched, thanks precisely to the possibility of being re- discovered.

The starting point for that first, originary grounding is our life world which we could characterize as follows. It is a world that is subjective but not conscious of its subjectivity, a world of a particular tradition but unaware of its particularity, a correlate of a specific, contingent humanity which is not aware o f its contingency. That humanity, to be sure, has to agree on this intersubjective world, must speak a common language which is the basis of truth and error (which is just a specific way of being in truth). The truth of our life-world is practical, im- precise, relative to a situation, yet in no sense merely imaginary or

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"relative" to an arbitrary individual preference. It is sufficient for the practical needs to which it relates. It is always close to intuition: the beings of this life world are concrete, given in their naive originality, even if from perspectives conditioned by particular viewpoints which are yet linked by a certain nonthematic reciprocity that functions as a kind of abstraction from such subjective peculiarities. Except when we are dealing specifically with individual humans, its givens are charac- terized by a typical generality and its determinations unprecise by their very nature.

Among its important peculiarities, we need to stress that we are deal- ing with a world of form. Form means privilege, and certain privileged forms are of a very special practical significance. We all know that from the very beginnings of ancient civilization it was considerations of sym- metry and correspondence that made possible the undertaking of im- mense constructions projects whose refinement and integrity still com- mand our admiration. Such undertakings in every case presuppose measurement, and measurement is made possible by a single form privileged among all others, that of a straight line, of an edge of a solid body along which we can place another such edge and which in turn can be laid alongside still another. This peculiarity lies at the beginnings of a process of unlimited refinement of measuring procedures whose initially subjectively-objective scope becomes, to be sure, purely con- ventional in the course of the development. Measuring operates in the dimension of pure objectivity, the dimension of a validity of meaning that is identical for anyone who carries out the procedure, and every improvement in the art of measurement is simultaneously a step toward precise objectification. To be sure, that precision is only an ideal limit which we can approach indefinitely but cannot actually reach. (Mea- surement naturally also presupposes that objectification which is ac- complished by numbering, based on the procedures of ordering and substitution, while those procedures in turn are based on a primordial ordering of the positions of partners in a discourse. Thus the life-world itself tends to objectification, though it always remains in a subjective indeterminacy.)

The decisive step in the transition to a new stage of rationality and world comprehension is precisely the insight that the process of tech- nical refinement of measuring, though open-ended in actuality and just because of that, aims at an ideal limit which can then be considered in isolation, constituting a realm of forms/concepts which are not only ob-

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jective but precise as well. These concepts, objective, so to speak, to the second power, cannot ever be fully actualized, yet they make possible perfectly identical operations and constructs so that all who master them find themselves in a realm of absolute identities. That idealization makes it possible to found elementary geometry as a rational science. The purity of geometric forms then gives birth, in the realm of general philosophic reflection, to a purity of ideas, with both pursuing the same ideal of a truth in itself, a truth no longer relative to a world of perspec- tives and approximations, our life-world, but a truth that is "absolute" in the sense of the ideal of non-relativity and precision.

To be sure, in spite of that staggering achievement, Greek science re- mains a science of privileged forms and of concepts capable of supply- ing true formulations of such "true forms." The "truths-in-themselves" formulated by Greek theory refer to idealized forms and, for that reason, are still close to our life world. The concentration of ancient geometry on the "five Platonic figures" faithfully reflects this science which, while opening to our life-world an access to the rationality of idealization, does not basically abandon its ground except to delimit it and to indicate the possibility of treating with rigorous precision what at first sight appears a hopeless confusion. Geometric idealization is not simply a hypothesis; it is a transition toward defining a certain in-itself which, by its a priori nature, is precisely what is definite.

Modem science, by contrast, is characterized by the idea of a uni- versal rationalization, carried to the extreme, which provides the actual world with a framework of precise definition and which not only no longer recognises any models of rationality, but no longer recognizes even any privileged instances or preferred domains. As already Auguste Comte noted, Cartesian geometry, allowing us to define precisely any form whatever and setting out to explore an infinite universe of forms, can serve as a representative instance of the spirit of that science. That, though, is b u t a particular example, illustrating the hitherto unheard-of idea of a single, infinite rational universe o f existing entities, capable o f being mastered by a rational science which exhausts it methodically and systematically. That is made possible by the projection of a formal mathematics, unknown to classical antiquity, which passes through the stages of algebra, infinitesimal calculus and algebraic analytic geometry. By means of the arithmetization of geometry we pass over to universal formalization. The development of the algebraic theory of numbers and magnitudes aims at a purely formal analysis, a theory of formal regions

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and a "logistic" in a modern sense. At the end of the 17th century, Leibniz conceived his general anticipation of a mathesis generalis, that is, a universal mathematics which our age is systematically constructing. Basically, it is a formal logic of regions of compossibility in the sense of possible forms of "whatever" in general and of a general theory of such domains. (What today is called "systems theory" is an attempt at con- structing such a universal formal mathematics.) Formalization and axiomatization, these are entirely novel problems in this region of a specifically modern rationality whose efficacy increases with its formal generality.

That efficacy goes hand in hand with two no less revolutionary ideas which Husserl links indissolubly with the name of Galileo. They are the ideas of precise causality and of indirect mathematization. The natural world of our life, as an aggregate of non-specifically typical forms, is also a totality of the approximately regular behavior of its components. However, just as indefinite forms can be determined precisely with the help of geometric idealizations, so the indefinite behaviors of things and the sequences of their typical changes can be analogously treated with the means of "chronogeometry." That is what allowed Galileo to transform the problem of movement into a question of a mathematical law. And just as in the case of statically considered spatial forms with their qualitative content, so also the possibilities of defining the form of movement and causal chains increased vastly, making them henceforth calculable and anlyzable. The impact of indirect mathematization is greater still. It, too, is rooted in the "naively given" life-world: that is where we experience gradations of intensity and the constant inter- weaving of the qualitative and the quantitative, and already ancient Greeks speculated about numbers as constituting substance, the very being of things. Thus it might seem as if indirect mathematization were only a strict parallel of spatial idealization and of the idealization of the causal behavior of things. In this respect, however, Husserl is con- vinced of an essential divergence. Indirect mathematization is not based simply on idealization but on a certain hypothesis. That hypothesis assumes that for any qualitative content whatever we can find a parallel in the strictly mathematical realm of spatial and spatiotemporal forms and thereafter deal with it alone, predicting future events on the basis of the precise calculability of these realsm, thereby bringing it under the rule of thought. In contrast with idealization, this hypothesis lacks all a priori evidence, but only reports, in its generality, a certain intui-

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tion which will certainly surprise anyone who reflects on it. That hypo- thesis - that there always is a corresponding rational geometric struc- ture for any qualitative datum - was and remains a hypothesis, and one of a special type which is constantly being verified and yet will always remain hypothetical. That way there emerges here, in what we could call objective rationality, the rationality of nature, a most remarkable duality, since we have only one ideally objective common rational form which has no parallel in the qualitative realm. We need to examine this fundamental fact closely and distinguish in it between methodological procedure and its interpretation. The methodological procedure con- sists of assigning to qualitatively experienced structures which can be- come actual experiences only as such (since that alone makes them ob- jects of seeing, given in their originality) purely mathematical spatio- temporal structures: for Galileo, primarily geometric ones. Galileo's interpretation, however, deviates fundamentally from his actual pro- cedure. What he does is to correlate two structures. The interpretation, however, based on the tradition of geometric idealization, claims to have reached the only true being of things which merely appear to be qualitative, just as in and through geometric idealization we grasp the true being o f extended things. That is the real meaning of Galileo's famous dictum that the book of nature is writ ten in triangles and circles. This assertion lies at the beginning of an extremely powerful tradition which grows ever stronger throughout the modern epoch. Its power increased especially as a result of ever more advanced formaliza- tion of mathematics. It is precisely this formalization that makes possible a constant reaffirmation of the power of the basic hypothesis which appears inexhaustible. We are constantly finding new formal structures that can be correlated with the data of some concrete realm, allowing us thereafter to treat the latter as an instance o f the former. Galileo's interpretation leads directly to two immensly weighty consequences. First of all, methodogy is here raised to the status of metaphysics; the natural world, the only one in which we can live directly and which alone can be the object of actual experience, here becomes the phenomenal appearance of a world of structures of being- in-itself, essentially mathematical. We have confused the efficacy of formalizations, their ability to predict phenomena, with their actual sig- nificance, that of ever more formal idealizations. This had led - as the second consequence - to an impoverishment of the significance of scientific procedure generally, as it no longer feels solid ground beneath

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its feet. Since it in fact seeks nothing but practical efficacy, concen- trated in formulas, it can see only this technical aspect of its task; the meaning of the structures themselves and their role in experience become ever more indifferent to it. (Some scientists then try to resolve this by constructing, no less abstractly, bridges of correspondence with concrete experiential reality, especially by using sensualist themes with their rich tradition, without giving thought to the metaphysical assump- tions they contain.) All this has in the end the effect of stripping science of its true, vital significance, elevating the realm of abstraction to the status of absolute reality which is said to appear "through" sense data. Since, thanks to the advances of formalization, this methodo- logical procedure can be applied universally, we are lead to an abstract physicalism whose ultimate consequence is to drive thought and its functioning from the realm of the real, situating it definitively in a secondary region of being, condemned to being displaced by objective structures which alone are said to be veridical and efficacious. Thus the world comes to be equated with an aggregate of physicalist structures (not physical only, but objective and efficacious and consistently mathematically construed), with a few remaining islands of subjective translations of secondary appearances. Then, as this view, both ex- tremely effective and extremely flat and tedious, has absolutely nothing to say to concrete human beings, as this complete draining of all mean- ing, raised to the status of ultimate truth (since it is science, the vital, socially effective instance of reason, which appears to claim it), affects contemporary society and its doings, it provokes reactions like irration- alism and mysticism, a reversion to action free of a rational basis, a flight to the realms of make-believe or to the sphere of pure feelings and mere corporeity.

This overview of the Husserlian position with respect to the science of his times and the crisis of European thought resulting from it calls for a brief supplementary commentary concerning its place among the theories of science, a commentary which is not yet a critique though it is the preparation for one. In the first place, it seems evident that there are here certain points of contact with positivism. It was precisely the positivism of Mach and Avenarius which set out to proclaim a return to the "natural world," only later abandoning it with a metaphysical intro- jection in favor of a purely explanatory science based on it. The great difference is Husserl's emphasis on the a priori and on idealization, and then the fact that, according to Husserl, it is not true that science is nothing but a practical prescription that attempts no explication.

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The Husserlian attitude differs from neo-Kantianism by its critical posture; the fact of science as it is actually practiced today is not for him something that should be provided with a rational justification but rather something to-be criticized from the viewpoint of a pure phenom- enology of reason. Many phenomenologists seek to make a common cause with the Neo-Kantians, defining phenomenology as a critical reflection on the conditions of knowledge for which evidence, reflec- tion and, correlatively, also verification form an indissoluble structure guaranteeing to philosophy its character of an autonomous science while yet avoiding all metaphysics.

A second comment has to do with the concept of our life-world (or the "natural world"). That world is not in any sense something like a given world, a world of the senses, as contrasted with a world we con- struct in thought. Though not constructed by active thought, it is still "const i tu ted" by it. I believe that the world as Kant conceived of it comes close to the natural world in Husserl's sense. It is the world of concrete experience, of a fundamental correlation of intuition and thought. In this respect, those who believe that Husserl erred in choos- ing Descartes rather than Kant as his philosophical tradition appear to me to be right. What Husserl denounces about our artificially con- structed world is not thought, functioning even in the realm of the given, but rather thought rendered wholly autonomous, which, in place of finding its intuitive fulfilment in experience, makes itself wholly independent of it and ultimately seeks to replace it, so reviving the at tempt of 17th century rationalism and succumbing equally naturally to the empiricism about which we are tempted to say, with Hegel, that it is its truth.

The mot i f of the natural world might thus have provided a suitable ground for the at tempt to build bridges between phenomenology and Kantianism. In fact, though, we can notice that the Husserlians with Neo-Kantian leanings show little sympathy for that motif , preferring subjective reflection on the fact of objectivity which is always cor- related with subjective functions that ground it and whose ever possible and ever corrigible examination constitutes the perennially open-ended yet necessary task of critical philosophy.

There might be an analogy between the position of neo-Kantianizing Husserlians with respect to Husserl and that of the Neo-Kantians with respect to Kant. Just as it was by no means Kant's intention to launch a critique of knowledge in general and of scientific knowledge in par-

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ticular, but rather to institute what we might call a metaphysics of ex- perience or, as others have put it, to provide general ontology with a foundation in the primordial source of our ideas, so the intention of Husserlian phenomenology is clearly metaphysical. In Crisis, Husserl states as much explicitly, at the same time providing the general outline of such a metaphysics. Metaphysics is what differentiates phenomeno- logical philosophy from phenomenology as the basic philosophical discipline. This fundamental discipline, though, as Husserl conceives of it, makes possible and aims at founding a metaphysics which, like the Kantian, is a metaphysics of experience. His method, however, is not that o f a logical and argumentative regress toward the conditions of possibility, but toward a method that is itself experiential or, better, intuitional. By intuition here we need to understand a rational insight in the Husserlian sense, that is, the primordial presence of the intended object before the mental gaze of the subject. Thus the turn to the natural world is not a return to some theoretical postulate, as for in- stance in the case of sensualism. It is to be accomplished by a descrip- tion freed of all prejudice and of all theoretical models or preconceived theories, a description ready to accept all that presents itself, within the limits within which it presents itself, with all the consequences. That is basically the method which Husserl practiced from his philosophical be- ginnings on, a method of exceptionally fecund unveiling of things that are not normally thematized because of their trivial nature. That is what Hegel had in mind when he said that the familiar need not yet be the evident ( g e k a n n t - e rkann t ) .

Before launching upon an exposition of the theory of the natural world which is to provide the cure for the illness that had reached the point of a crisis, let us stress once more the extreme ingenuity and perspicacity of Husserrs diagnosis whose relevance has grown rather than diminished with the passage of time. One o f the greatest contradic- tions of our epoch is here analyzed in exceptionally clear and convincing terms. Science, the vital foundation of our life as a community , without which mankind could simply not survive in the industrial age, lies at the same time at the roots o f the emptiness of modern life, of its anonym- ization, o f the draining of all tangible meaningfulness in a bot tomless abstraction. That which makes life possible by supplying us with the means of living at the same time strips life o f all higher reasons for living, leaving us alone in face of the chaos of instincts and of traditions devoid of any but merely factual cohesion. Today we might put it even

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more strongly: the very practical advantages bestowed by science have become problematic, the emptiness of life has become almost tangible with the absurd possibility of a negation of all life, brought about by a destructive power surpassing all that humans can construct and produce positively. Having first furnished the instruments of suicide to an Europe which, with its monopoly on rational civilization, had for two centuries exercised a virtually complete mastery over the globe and had identified itself with humanity as such, this power has today created a setting for an age of mega-societies which is now beginning to unfold before our eyes, an age characterized by growing anxiety and by the frequent refusal of younger generations to participate in it. Since the diagnosis has proved so penetrating, we have every reason for concern- ing ourselves with an analysis of the proposed cure.

Unfortunately, we are forced to admit that the so-called phenomen- ological metaphysics which Husserl puts forth as the result and the basis of his analytic description of the natural world is in the end disappoint- ing. Nor did Husserl ever develop it fully; the work remained incom- plete. We can best glean the solution that guided him from the lecture he delivered in Vienna in 1935. There he sketches the image of a natural world conceived as a product of the common achievements (Leistungen) of subjectivities for whom this world is nothing but a common link devoid of any genuine substantiality. It is, in truth, a complete inversion of the physicalist view, a more than Copernican reversal. In place of islets of subjectivity surrounded by an infinite sea of physicalist structures, of abstract schemata stripped of qualities and of life, we now have a sea of allegedly transcendental intersubjectivity surrounding objective unities constituted as unities of meaning by the common efforts of communicating consciousnesses. This metaphysical outcome is unsatisfactory on several counts. First of all, it deprives the natural world of naive life of that independence of being which natural- ly characterises its "objects," relative, to be sure, to finite conscious- nesses which identify themselves with their corporeal substrata; a meta- physics of transcendental subjectivity constituting the world, however, would demand absolute, absolutely given subjects. It would seem that, in this solution, Husserl admixed, to the phenomenological conception of a natural world as the elementary stratum of our experience, essen- tially subjective but internally related to an ensemble of finite subjects, an older phenomenological conception for which the core of the phe- nomenological effort focused on apodictic immanence given in a reflec-

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tion on the stream of consciousness which presents itself to it with an absolute originality. If subjectivity is the natural world itself, then it is not only superfluous but outright impossible to seek another infinite foundation, since then the world itself is infinity. Transcendental sub- jectivity is then nothing but a dream in no way justified by the phe- nomenology of the natural world.

Does that mean that the very idea o f a turn to the natural world as to the forgotten foundation which gives the objects o f science their genuine meaning as experienced being, leads nowhere? Of itself, the idea appears to open a hitherto untried avenue of thought, though we have yet to provide an analytic description of' that world or to deter- mine its relation to concrete human beings. Still, certain phenomeno- logical endeavors do seem to offer valuable contributions to this idea at points that Husserl had neglected. Allow me to mention several of them.

We might first ask whether, in considering it in its role of the for- gotten foundation of scientific rationality, we are grasping the natural world in its primordial givenness or whether, on the contrary, in giving preference to this viewpoint, we are not seeing it onesidedly. Our life- world is, after all, primordially a world of human practice, a world where people eat and work and devote themselves to tasks which they carry out by relying on that ever available yet ever overlooked resource of our physical, corporeal existence. Does not this world open itself more to my "I can" than to my "I perceive" or my "I observe?" Is not the primordial givenness of our life-world initially an originality of an active order, and is it not objects at which we aim when we let ourselves beguided by its contours from one moment of our tasks to another? So considered, the natural world would not be so much a world of intuitions as one utilizing intuitions as an avenue to its most primordial functions. And those functions - they are that for the sake of which we engage in the practice o f the pragmata that we encounter along the way. Along the way to what? Precisely to that for the sake of which, and that for the sake o f which is always an ou heneka that constitutes my presence amid that ensemble o f pragmata ordered around the task I am to carry out. It is in terms of this ou heneka that I understand my- self, and this ou heneka not only calls forth and guides my action from one pragma to another, but at the same time makes these pragmata in- telligible to me together with myself. The comprehension of things and of myself joint ly constitute a structured whole whose members refer to

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each other, and all our doings, our handling of things and dealing with them, are guided by that whole at which they aim, even if never posit- ing it in view, never thematizing it. Each of my doings has its theme, a certain natural task that belong to me, yet all themes, without having to be " thought" or " thematized," transcend in the direction of that non-thematic total i ty which links each specific ou heneka with the pragmata which sustain it or stand in its way. Now it is precisely in this nonthematic whole toward which all practice transcends itself that we actually live, that is " the place" of concrete life, it is what we have in mind when we speak of being in the world, which means the same as "living," and it is what we leave when we disappear from the circle of the living, when we have died. This is the phenomenon that Heraclitus had in mind when he said that waking humans share a com- mon world from which each of them returns to his own world on re- tiring to sleep and to dream. Thus our doing transcends itself in the direction of that totali ty to which our ou heneka is the key and which, in virtue of that, merits the title o f "world," the natural world of our life. Or, philosophically speaking, it is not this concrete context , struc- tured by our active life, that merits the name, as much as that about the very foundations of our actual life that makes such a structuring possible - the worldhood of the world toward which the human Dasein transcends himself.

Now we can see right away that such a natural world is not first of all a world in which experience in the sense of intuition - whether sense intuition or any other kind - is possible but rather a world of good (and of evil). For the good is but another way of speaking of the "for the sake o f which", the ou heneka which, above all objects, tasks, programs and handling of things, guides that structuration. The Husserl- Jan demand of a primordial givenness, of delving beneath all that is derivative to the primary source, takes us from the world as a correlate of an intuition presenting things themselves (rather than their sub- stitutes in empty or imaginatively filled intuitions, their symbolic or purely formal surrogates), toward a world that is first o f all one of good (and of evil) and that, in virtue of this, deserves to be called the world of actual human existence.

Actual human existence, however, as being in the world, can never be seized in itself and for itself, apart from the movement that situates it among things and places it in contact with them. Subjectivity is thus precisely our life-world in its concrete totality. And this subjectivity is

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essentially finite, that is, it must turn to the things which our manipula- tion and its fundamental presupposition subject to its structuration. It neither creates these things nor adds anything to them, and yet it lies at the origin of our understanding of things, that is, that we understand that they are and what they are, how they function and to what they refer. Husserl had believed in a subjectivity that could be grasped separately, in the interiority of its own immanence, by an objectifying reflection. Yet there is no such absolute subjectivity,just as there is no natural life world that would be a world of intuitive experiences. This life-world is a world of good and evil, and its subjectivity is that of the drama of good and evil, the good and evil of an essentially finite being who cannot live except by projecting nonthematical ly some good before him while equally nonthematically ever "knowing" that this pro- jection is accompanied by the shadow of the extreme possibility of not projecting at all.

From this viewpoint, the natural world can be understood entirely naturally: it is a world where we can live, live in a communi ty in which we can find a place and be accepted, enjoying the protection which enables us to take on the concrete tasks of defense and of struggle against what threatens us in the context of humans and of things alike. It is the world of embodied living beings who work and struggle, who approach each other and draw back, living in mutual respect; who com- municate with the world of others by word and understanding; who relate to this existence in its totali ty and so also to the world as such. Corporeity, reciprocity, concrete spatiality which includes both the familiar and the foreign, language - those are the constant structures of that world. Finding a place, growing close to others and renewing protective bonds is one of its fundamental circular movements while the other is constituted by the structures of human distantiation and organization demanded by the ongoing struggle between humans and against the crushing power of things. Finally there are also the reference points of a wholly different importance and depth, orienting our being in body and in light, presenting to us the hidden depth of what ad- dresses us: the sky and the earth, that which, under the innocuous appearance of what is ever present in and through the things of nature, ultimately reveals itself as the all-embracing mold of the mystery of things and of life. And all the movements to which we have referred are borne by ' the fundamental mobility of human existence face to face with its fundamental dilemma that consists in not being able to subsist

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except thanks to a concealed knowledge, concealing itself from itself, of a good ever mysterious in its indispensible presence and accompanied by a no less mysteriously ambiguous shadow. That is why we finally must consider the natural world as one of a concrete historicity, not solely because of its essential traditionality but because of the drama of "his tory" which unfolds itself in it, e v ~ new under old modes.

Let me, finally, complete this rather impoverished at tempt at pre- senting the problems of an analysis of the natural world as one of good and evil with a few critical observations.

The natural world as a world of good and evil certainly overturns the Husserlian world of a subjectivity which seeks first of all to know and so transforms everything, including subjectivity itself, into an object of intuition. A subjectivity of this type might, to be sure, point out certain diseases of reason, as when Husserl confronts the most technical of sciences anew with the critical question which Kant addressed to meta- physics. Can it, though, show us a positive way for reason to follow so that it could found not only a new science or a new foundation for science, but a genuine human praxis? Ji~rgen Habermas, speaking in Prague some years ago about the social sciences, expressed some doubts about the possibilities of phenomenology as they are presented in the Crisis. Now to bring the major force o f our contemporary social life under critique is surely no small achievement, and to indicate at the same time where in all likelihood it deviated into an unbridled technol- ogy is already a practical service. Still, we need to say that the positive side is not fully reached and that the proposed therapy is not yet a positive prescription for making life full and enabling it to rediscover itself.

Can a concept of our life-world as a world of good and evil lead us to that? Perhaps so, if it can show us something real that is capable of bearing something like a life-fulfilling meaning, valid not only sub- jectively but, so to speak, in itself. For, ultimately, humans will willing- ly come to terms with all manner of tribulation as long as the experi- ence is clearly accompanied by such a clear vision. Is not, though, the natural world as a world of good and evil still a subjective world? Is it not therefore subject to all the eclipses and catastrophes of finite existences? In effect, if it is finite existence that is the concrete, if that is what makes our primordial life world possible, have we not escaped from one subjectivism only to plunge into another, still more oppressive one?

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If it really is finite existence which, projecting its possibilities in the form of a non-thematic ou heneka, transcends itself toward the world, we cannot claim that this world is only its creation. Our life-world has no other function than to make itself transparent to the things and per- sons whom it reveals and manifests. This world belongs to what we might call manifestation, a special dimension of being. The rules and structures of manifestation are not those of the beings manifested. The being of the manifestation is not human doing; the time it assumes is not created by existence; the manifestation includes and needs humans but other things as well and, finally, it is the manifestation, the being of phenomena, that phenomenology, in my view, sees. So let me conclude this exposition with the words of Hegel, stripping them of their refer- ence to an absolute, infinite spirit: "The phenomenon is a birth and a perishing which itself is neither born nor perishes but exists in itself; and its movement consists in furnishing to the truth the essence of its life."