(1963)
In the second of his three 1919 essays on Leonardo da Vinci, Paul Valéry makes one of his many open, or, even more frequently, hidden, attacks on Pascal. He sets his hero Leonardo off against the dark foil of a thinker who is without any feeling for art, obsessed only by the risky wager on the absolute. For Pascal, nature was nothing but the gaping abyss of infinity on the path to salvation. Valéry characterizes the thinker and technician Leonardo, on the other hand, in the following terms: “No abyss opening on his right. An abyss would make him think of a bridge.”1
This is to put the whole elementary state of affairs most succinctly: that the commonly used antithesis of nature and technology [Technik] is insufficient when it comes to understanding the modern phenomenon of technization [Technisierung]. Rather, already at the level of intuiting what is given, the relationship between modern man and the world is highly nuanced, reflecting the choice the age has already made in the matter. The image of the abyss provides its metaphor: An eye like Pascal’s is transfixed by that image’s vertical line; the unfathomable dark of the chasm captivates the gaze only to prepare thought resolutely to choose the opposite direction, that of transcendence. An eye like Leonardo’s spontaneously seizes on the image’s horizontal line as the chance to connect both edges of the abyss to vault the obstacle; or it sees in the void of the chasm the testing ground for a mechanical bird. There is not only the kind of nature that resists technology and is destroyed and abused by it—nature that lets the enormous vanity of man’s efforts slide off of itself and that renders it perceptible by continually shattering his instruments. Instead, there is also the kind of nature that is like a call for man’s reins and bridles, his paths and bridges, his gripping and clearing machinery, his toys and his appetite for consumption.
The challenge the modern gaze recognizes in nature has no longer anything to do with the notion that nature is, as it were, prepared for man, disposed towards his needs, or at least that nature contains the economic minimum necessary to support his existence. Neither in Leonardo nor in Pascal is there any room for the astonishment at the order that takes each and every creature into account, which the Greeks, under the name of cosmos, designated so explicitly as the motivation that gave rise to the fundamental questions of philosophy. Neither Giordano Bruno’s enthusiasm in the face of the infinite, nor Pascal’s horror at this abyss contain anything of the reassurance guiding pure theoretical contemplation that the cosmos bestowed upon the Greeks. If the Leonardo of Valéry’s dictum had really thought of a bridge in the face of the abyss, then he, too, would have merely leapt over the stage of feeling horror, but he would not have omitted it. The act of self-assertion, which avoids exposure to the chasm’s pull in the first place, does not make it disappear. Thinking from one fixed point to another—which includes the leap as much as giving oneself up to transcendence—receives its necessity and energy precisely from the anxiety about its ineliminable discontinuities. Insofar as the modern age finds itself confronted with philosophical problems of its own making at all, they arise not from astonishment, but discontent, from the “uneasiness” of Locke.2 This is why the problem of technology is such a characteristic element of modern, contemporary thought, even though the problem of technology has not yet been clearly distinguished from the problems of technology (spoken once in the genitivus obiectivus, and once in the genitivus subiectivus). We are richly blessed with ontologies, theologies, and especially demonologies of technology—but this abundance is the very reason for the tedium that makes one hope to hear the word “technology” only from the mouth of a technician. In this way, the productivity of professionalized philosophy contributes to the continuous renewal of this uneasiness, which in turn today nourishes philosophy.
The problem of technology may have concealed itself under the mass of spoken and printed words among which nothing appears to remain unsaid—for in what is interrogated excessively, the questionable withdraws much more thoroughly than in that which is still uninterrogated, a state in which the Greeks found the world to be. Whenever philosophy was too willing to believe itself close to solving its problems, it had to deal with the fruitful disappointment of learning that it had not even discovered these problems themselves, or rather, had thought them to be posed too crudely. To that which is supposedly already on its course, calls to order have always sounded trivial, annoying, foolish, and disruptive in this situation. This was the case at the beginning of our century, when Edmund Husserl’s call to order—“to the things themselves!”—rang out. Philosophy, fully immersed in criticizing everything else, was once again called back upon criticizing its own relationship to its objects. The century or so of what called itself philosophy of technology that has passed since the appearance of Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture (1877) has produced a sense of obviousness of what in the case of technology was “the thing itself”—a sense that is already highly suspicious. The definition of this thing itself Kapp presented by consistently developing the motto that he gave to his book: “All of human history, upon close scrutiny, ultimately resolves into the history of the invention of better tools.”3
Correspondingly, the term “technology” evokes in us a colorful series of images: devices, vehicles, propulsion motors, storage units, manual and automatic instruments, conductors, switches, signals, and so forth—in short, a universe of things that are at work all around us, whose complete classification has often been attempted to little success, whose unifying factor, which the concept “technology” signifies, seems impossible to grasp, and which is therefore rendered unquestionable in a nominalistic way. With the appropriate conceptual frugality, “technization” is then to be understood as the constant multiplication and condensation of this thing-world.
But where exactly is the “problem” of technology located? Where can it be located, since each and every one of these technical things, whose existence is based on being constructed, poses no problem other than that of its technological improvement or obsolescence, and which is generally devoid of any problem insofar as one can, in principle, understand its construction? Anyone who sees a tree is confronted with an impenetrable and, as we have to believe today, inexhaustible theoretical dimension; the observer of a locomotive has a thing at hand all of whose data are stored in a factory’s construction office.
The problem of technology seems to result from the combined problems having to do with the side effects of technological achievements: the traffic accidents, the noise of machinery, the exhaust fumes, the garbage, the waste water of industrial plants, the speed that is imposed on our work by machines, and the deviation from the natural rhythms of life, including the monotonization of industrial work, and so forth. If technology is defined in this way, optimists have an easy time, for all these are problems immanent to technology, which are often already technologically solved, even if these solutions are not profitable or unattractive in terms of social prestige and are thus not realized. It is not this kind of problematic that the problem of technology yields, because in the end it amounts to the realization that the sphere of technological things and achievements is not technological enough, lagging behind its own principles. When in 1936 Chaplin’s cruel satire Modern Times supplied the uneasiness with technology with the most drastic images of men subservient to mechanisms, every technological expert had already known for a long time that the worker chasing the assembly line with his wrench was, from a technological point of view, by then a fossilized phenomenon, whose continued existence had other than technological reasons. Any kind of thinking that believes itself to be reacting to or against technology in this direction will very quickly find itself confronted with the consequence of having to demand not the limitation or overcoming but the full execution of the principle of technicity. It was Rousseau, who, in a significant passage, first connected his critique of the conditions of the society of his time with the postulate fully to execute the principle at work in this state, because he understood that history was irreversible.4 Against his critic Diderot, he demanded not a return to nature but the consistent and thorough carrying out of artificiality in the structure of human socialization: “Let us show him in perfected nature the redress of the evils which beginning art caused to nature.”5
Here we can see how historicism, with its insight into the irreversibility of history, together with cultural and social criticism, increased the dynamism of the modern age’s inner tendencies and still continues to do so—also with regard to the consciousness that supports technization.
But this criticism of a misguided approach does not give us any more insight into our “thing itself.” It is the rule of the above-mentioned antithesis of technology and nature that still stands in the way of our getting a clear view of the thing itself, or, put more tentatively, what does so is the association of these concepts in our tradition since the Greeks.6 In this coupling, the concept of technology was subject to a transformation in the history of the concept that turned “nature” from a concept for the generative principle of objects into the epitome of the generated objects itself—in other words, from the focus on the natura naturans [creating nature] to a focus on the natura naturata [created nature]. To the Greeks, their technē [art; technology] had primarily meant those skills and abilities that were apt to create specific achievements and products, and which could be learned through looking and imitating, just in the same way one can learn a “technique” in sports, for instance. That it was possible to learn a technique in this way—that one could understand doing a thing without having to understand the thing itself and tying back the necessity of its execution to the essence of that thing—distinguished technical knowing-how from the theoretical-scientific relation toward the object. But in the end, the tradition of learning and imitating had to begin with someone who had, once and for all, deduced skill from insight, who had been able to develop what is appropriate to the thing from understanding the thing, so that, after all, technology and knowledge, skill and insight, converged at their root and were, at bottom, one and the same.
The separation of understanding a thing and mastering a thing was presented to the Greeks as a grand opportunity, both as a chance and an experiment, through the attitude represented by the Sophists. In the second half of the fifth century, the type of a released and isolated “technology” was presented for the first time in the realms of politics and law. The sophists offered an education that only required to know how something was done, which taught the steps and skills of the art that led to any chosen goal without any insight into law, grounding, and the objective necessity of the formulae handed down. Our whole tradition has been marked by the effective resistance with which Socrates—emerging himself from the bosom of Sophism—opposed it and demanded that all ability always be kept within the horizon of understanding, that no skill be released from the insight that constitutes it, that all correctness [Richtigkeit] be based on the question of its rightfulness [Rechtlichkeit]. Philosophy reached its classical heights in antiquity not only by setting itself apart from rhetoric, but in so doing, it also incorporated into its foundations the conceptual standards with which rhetoric—a technology that had no reference to being, truth, and the good—could henceforth be put in the wrong. It was not only the priority of theoretical intuition as an attitude appropriate to human reason, but even more so the priority of an objective realm untouched and untouchable by man, which opposed anything technical and artificial to the natural and would concede the former any meaning only through its origin in the latter—that is, through mimesis. The separation of philosophy from rhetoric, of theory from technology, of scientia from ars was, however, unsuccessful precisely at the point where philosophy appeared to have reached a deadlock in pursuing its self-posed absolute aspirations, as in late antiquity and at the end of the Middle Ages. At these moments, the artes became autonomous, acquired the title of philosophy and demonstrated what man is capable of without ever knowing to the last detail why. Philosophy had, at each end of each epoch, reached its end in skepticism and mysticism respectively, and gave way to skill unconcerned about its justification. In both cases, we find proof that the engineer as much as the geometer were given the title philosophus.7 It had become philosophy’s fate that it could achieve the self-assertion of its substance only against “technology” in the broadest sense.
On these historical presuppositions rests the mutual conditionality of the traditional questions for nature as well as culture and technology (both of which are derived from their common conceptual root of the “artificial”). In this way, the question for “natural nature” can be posed, in search for a normative orientation for the original determination and classification of human existence in the world. The artificial appears here as a superimposition onto the fundamental stratum of the natural and can be uncovered by a process of “subtraction.” In the fifth book of his didactic poem De rerum natura [On the Nature of Things], Lucretius developed the notion—which had a long-lasting effect on all modern forms of cultural criticism—of a pretechnical human state of existence, which, through spontaneous inventions by man, had been distorted and deformed into the state of culture. In the following tradition and in variations of this scheme, the authentic series of the inventiones [inventions]—from the primal achievement of humans, kindling and taming fire, all the way to the invention of the plough, agriculture, clothing and housing, forms of socialization, mores and laws, marriage, language, property, and religion—was reshaped again and again in characteristic fashion. Once this cultural stratum is cleared away, Lucretius’s prehistorical man comes to the fore. He is human from the start—not yet thought to have emerged from the animal world—but a human who nevertheless shares the animals’ way of life: “vitam tractabant more ferarum” [“they passed their lives after the wide-wandering fashion of wild beasts”].8 This meant that man was, according to his original and binding nature, an atechnical being, completely immersed in the dumb consumption of what the natural environment offered and thus a being without any unmet needs, without wonder and fear, without questions. According to this schema, a deviation must have occurred, that original sin through which man sought to uncouple the self-creation of his existence from the pre-givenness of nature and elevate himself to the rank of a sophisticated and questioning counterpart of the given. Lucretius at once sees this as an act of self-empowerment of man against nature: “homines voluerunt se … potentes” [men desired to be … powerful].9 As man began to fill his world with the novae res [new things], the innovations of his inventive power, he did not also begin to fulfill and actualize his natural predisposition, but ceased to be the essentially mature and world-competent natural being in his original equilibrium. One can see at once the potential for cultural criticism hidden in this schema, and it was Rousseau who fully exhausted it, probably specifically because he associated the incomprehensible fact of the human will to superfluity with the ideas of the fall and the lost paradise, which through Christianity had become a part of consciousness. This highly virulent amalgamation has had a lasting effect on the ambivalent relation of modern man toward his cultural world. But it served to orient his moral assessments more than his understanding. For despite the obvious familiarity with the motif of the fall, the transition from self-sufficiency in the state of nature toward the luxuriating of inventiveness remained especially difficult to understand or was only imagined to have been understood—that is, in other words, Lucretius’s fortuna [chance], which made the world emerge from the swerve of falling atoms.10 That the problem of this transition is, however, the main point, we hope to indicate by speaking of “technization” as a process, and not of technology as a sphere of things.
This problem, of course, remains concealed, if one accepts as an unquestioned result of biological or philosophical anthropology that man—as a creature occurring in nature and testified to in his products—could only be recognizably defined by his use of fire and tools and the traces he leaves through them, that is, that man could from the start and by virtue of his definition only be a homo faber. Neither the antithesis of nature and technology—“nature” being the remaining difference once the strata of culture have been subtracted—nor the presupposition of the “natural” technicity of man leads toward the problem that is technization as a process. This process begins spontaneously in history and seems to stand in no comprehensible relation to human nature but, on the contrary, ruthlessly impels the adaptation of this nature, which is so inadequate to his needs.
One methodically obvious way to circumvent the old questions so influenced by the assumptions of metaphysical anthropology is to yield to the demands of a phenomenological approach; with the problem at hand, too, this approach seeks to initiate a philosophy of unbiased new beginnings. Since Descartes, we may have been very much aware that a pure and ahistorical beginning never existed and cannot be performed. The commitment of that aspiration, however, remains as an idea that is constantly making claims on us.
We would have to ask, then, whether phenomenology as it is, in the methodological shape given to it by Edmund Husserl, can offer an approach to the problem of technization—an approach that, as befits the radicalism of this problem, may lie in the scope of the most fundamental phenomenological analysis. Husserl has provided us with unmistakable hints in his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, written between 1934 and 1937, that at least he himself regarded the achievements of his method to be fruitful for this problem by, for the first time, projecting the insights of phenomenology’s eidetic and transcendental method onto the level of the historical genesis of our intellectual world. In this undertaking, the sphere of historical facts served only as a symptomatic layer that allowed hidden complexes of meaning to be disclosed which, to Husserl, would in the end form an idea of European history’s purposefulness. Not for a moment do I deny that such a teleology transcends the competence of strict phenomenological description and analysis, and that it claims the right of conjecture, which is, of course, open to all sorts of doubts. But speculation is not the caprice typical of fiction; it has its own type of justification and its own specific prudence of utilization. I shall begin by elucidating the nexus of consequences in which this late speculation stood to Husserl’s early deployment of phenomenology.11
Phenomenology strives to describe what is given to us and how it is given to us. In so doing, it comes upon the most fundamental fact, as something that is given to us most directly, that our consciousness only ever exists insofar as something is given to it—it is conscious of something. For this trivial-seeming fact, Husserl adopted Franz Brentano’s concept of intentionality. Phenomenology had used this term to oppose the atomistic view of consciousness, which interpreted objects as associations of data in the stream of consciousness. Against this, Husserl emphasized as essential that every consciousness does not simply “have” its objects, but that it, wherever possible, always stands in intention toward the full givenness of its objects. Consciousness is a meaningfully directed productive structure, interlaced with an unceasing directed purposefulness, which—extending from the empty negation contained in the mere appellation of a name toward the fulfilled intuition—leaves no possibility for any further determination. Mundane and practical life may interrupt the performance of such fulfillments of objecthood, and out of necessity content itself with fragments of intuitions, with indications and intimations, with formulae and signs; but the theoretical stance, once it is left to its own devices and set into motion unwaveringly, passes through the wealth of perspectives that can be taken in regard to the object. Consciousness is never satisfied with intuiting the object statically; instead, it always has a direction, predetermined by the object’s internal contexts that can be deduced from it. Objects are not accumulations of the contents of consciousness but consist in their “possibility of … original identification” and their allocation to one “identical pole.”12
It is plain to see that Husserl opposed the mechanistic notion of consciousness in late nineteenth-century psychology with an interpretation of the phenomena of consciousness that by its very design implies a teleology of consciousness. This consequence Husserl realized himself only late in life, but a reader whose view is sharpened through the late work may already discern it when Husserl extends the problem of the object toward the problem of the object horizon [Gegenstandshorizont]. This object horizon repeats the structure of original relations and of internal contexts of reference Husserl initially had uncovered in the structure of the intuitions of objects in the process of being fulfilled. The “internal reference” that the process of experiencing an object follows finds its counterpart in the “external reference,” grounded in a typology of the continuation of experience that is always part of the actual givenness. Now, this structure of reference does presuppose the unbroken and noncontradictory harmoniousness of the given, which Husserl also calls the “universal normal harmony” [universale Normalstimmigkeit]13 of experience and in which this harmoniousness is founded; its effect is that we judge the given to be reality and accept it as such for us. But the horizon structure is more than the unity of this negative determination; it is something like a morphological determination.14 In the last instance, the intentionality of consciousness is fulfilled in the most comprehensive horizon of horizons—in the “world” as the regulative pole-idea of all possible experience, the system that keeps all possibilities of experience in a final harmony, and in which alone what is given to experience can prove itself to be real.15 Husserl had described in his earliest analyses the sense data of sensualism to be characteristics that cannot be isolated from their objectual base, and that have been objectified only through an act he called “emphasis,”16 and similarly, in the “world” as the horizon of all horizons, objecthood is likewise isolated and stressed in an act analogous to emphasis. “Nature,” too—and this is essential for our topic—is the result of such emphasis. It is thus not equiprimordial to world but a derivative, already constricted objective horizon. Nature, so much can already be seen, cannot be the counterconcept to technology, for already in the concept of nature itself we find a deformation—an emphasis—of the original world-structure.
Now, what is crucial is that in his late work Husserl extends the approach he had found in the intentionality of consciousness onto history. Only here does the horizon-structure attain its full meaning: that which is co-present in all experience can now be the memory of a whole cultural community and its tradition, but also its expectations of the future that depend on a very specifically preformed consciousness of possibilities. The Husserl of the Philosophical Investigations had already shown how in the perception of objects from “partial intentions” a “total intention” arises that integrates them and that is already inherent in them.17 Yet this schema gains its full illuminating power only with history as its subject. Before the phenomenologist’s eye, history loses the illusion of facticity: That man has history can mean for him only that, even in the course of generations and epochs, he stays with what is already irrefutably inherent in the basic structure of consciousness, that is, with the fulfillment of intentionality. In a manuscript from 1936 that Eugen Fink published only three years later,18 Husserl highlighted the difference between a mere history of facts and his form of contemplating history as an “inner structure of meaning” via the example of geometry, which, of course, suited his purposes rather well: “All factual history remains incomprehensible because, always merely drawing its conclusions naively and straightforwardly from facts, it never makes thematic the general ground of meaning on which all such conclusions rest, has never investigated the immense structural a priori which is proper to it.”19
The “internal history” Husserl demands here not only can but indeed must gravitate toward the “highest question of a universal teleology of reason.”20 The subject of “history” is defined in the last consequence of phenomenology thus: “[H]istory is from the start nothing other than the vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning.”21
But this definition of history does not simply address the question of coping with it scientifically and theoretically. It also defines the self-determination and self-responsibility that is assigned as a task to all subjects who live and participate in history, that is, the self-determination toward those subjects’ function in history. As will be shown in the following, the problem of technology essentially has to do with the manner in which man is responsible for history; this was in fact true long before it could be perceived and become vivid that technology actually determines man’s existence, and indeed, decides his possibilities.
A peculiar piece of Cartesian heritage is embedded in Husserl’s understanding of history: history, which Husserl saw as a process of founding and developing meaning, has a beginning. This is by no means obvious if we keep in mind that any individual finds himself always already “enclosed” in history and that we therefore can have no experience of any such beginning. For those familiar with Descartes, of course, a model is available in his decision—who for so long counted as the founder of modernity—once in his life and thus once and for all to start from scratch and from the ground up with the business of knowledge. We need not discuss the question of how Cartesian Husserl has been to see without any doubt how lasting an impression this decision of Descartes’s made on Husserl’s own enterprise.22 This is why for him the Cartesian decision for a radical beginning can exist as the “primal establishment” [Urstiftung] of the whole of European intellectual history, namely, in the first adoption of the theoretical attitude by the Greeks. That here Husserl can speak of a “reorientation” presupposes a primary state that had not been theoretically structured but by a “natural primordial attitude, … the attitude of original natural life,” and this state corresponds to “the first originally natural form of cultures.”23 European history unfolded from a decision for a “fixed style of willing life” of European humanity.24 This image of the historical beginning is certainly in accordance with the ethos of philosophizing and the conception of man that was authoritative for Husserl—but in the development of the phenomenological approach and its concept of consciousness’ intentionality, it is inconsistent to posit such a “beginning” for the theoretical attitude and have it be preceded by a heterogeneous phase of original naturalness in the human attitude toward the world. If, according to its intentional makeup, consciousness is predisposed toward fulfilled intuition, then the “telos of intentionality”25 may be unfulfilled or even unknown in its final aspirations, displaced by other claims and necessities of life, but it cannot be, as it were, invented as something new, but can only proceed from its intentional implications and break through toward formulating and recognizing itself as “idea-as-a-task.”26 If consciousness is intentionality, and if the possibility of fulfilled intuition and self-evidence determine the unity of what is given to it, then the notion of a natural, pretheoretical primordiality is a mythic fiction.27
The double meaning of Husserl’s “life-world”—as, on the one hand, a historical starting point of theoretical reorientation, and, on the other, a still co-present fundamental stratum of life as it is differentiated into tiered interests—burdens this concept with the danger that it be put on par with the always futile attempts to find something like a “natural nature” and to present this nature as a norm of the primordial life of which one is actually deserving. Against this interpretation stands Husserl’s definition of life-world as a “universe of what is pre-given as obvious.”28 Obviousness [Selbstverständlichkeit], however, is by no means a positive value, no expression of existence’s security within the stable and unquestionable. Quite the contrary, the obvious is the mirror concept to the “self-understanding” [Selbstverständigung] that for Husserl must be the real task of any phenomenological philosophy.29 After all, essential to the obvious is not simply that no one thinks it capable even of not being understood [Unverstandensein], but, further, that it constitutes a guarding sanction that disavows all questions that penetrate into this sphere as impudence and curiosity. Understood this way, the life-world—no matter whether it is understood as preworld or common world—is the always inexhaustible reserve of the unquestionably available, familiar and, precisely due to this familiarity, unknown. Everything that is real in the life-world has an influence on life, is used and consumed, sought after and fled from, but it also remains hidden in its contingency, that is, it is not experienced as something that could also be different. If Husserl sees the meaning of European intellectual history in “transforming the universal obviousness [Selbstverständlichkeit] of the being of the world … into something intelligible [Verständlichkeit]”30 and presents his phenomenology as the realization of this historical meaning, particularly resolving “the obviousness … into its transcendental questions,”31 then for him, the life-world as the universe of self-asserting obviousness cannot, after all, have a salvific or salutary meaning. The dismantling of the life-world as such could not have led European history into its modern-age crisis. It does Husserl more justice to assume that it was rather the form of this dismantling, its illegitimacy as exploitation, that has led to the crisis. It was not the theoretical reorientation that prompted the decision to step out of the life-world, but the inconsistency with which this step was executed that rendered the overall process critical. Likewise, technization is not the alternative to the life-world, but the self-realization of theoretical reorientation’s inconsistency. If we consider this analysis more closely, some light is shed on technology as “applied” science, a notion that seems perfectly self-evident. For Husserl, as will be shown, technization is the manifestation of a science to which itself and its process of understanding is not yet or no longer clear. In this case, the recourse to the life-world obtains its function through the fact that it tries to find, precisely in the concealment of the obvious, a preliminary approach for the mode of access that is appropriate to discovery. For Husserl, there is no innocence in what he calls “natural experience.”32 Rather, the task is to recognize its debt [Schuld] and to shoulder it so that one can fulfill the obligations imposed on us. In this way, all natural experience carries out “a kind of abstraction” that then “tempts philosophical thought into absolutizing mere abstractions.”33
If Husserl sees the essence of the modern age’s natural science in a specific abstraction underlying it, then this is not a late lapse in European intellectual history, but only the late consequence of a contraction of intuition that is already inherent in natural experience. The life-world, then, by no means has the fullness and opulence of a mythical paradise nor the innocence that goes with it. When Husserl saw himself confronted with “the great task of a pure theory of essence of the life-world,”34 he was not concerned with an ideal object but with the attainment of a boundary notion able to do justice to the construction of an ahistorical beginning of history, an atheoretical “prehistory,” and which in this way had to legitimize the possibility of “repeating” a radical beginning in thought—but in the end, he ended up doing the opposite and could not have done any better. For Descartes and Bacon, the problem of the “beginning” had been simpler, that is, postscholastical: for them, the whole of history that had preceded them had only led to a tremendous burden of prejudice that could easily be thrown off and left them with the task of reconstruction without any presuppositions. Husserl, too, had adopted this pathos of a radical beginning and connected it with the methodical demand of “free variation,” for which the complex of intuitions that can be had in a world makes up a stock that can be handled arbitrarily in manifold ways. The limit concept of the life-world reduces the boundlessness of the eidetic variation to the methodology of description and the “imaginative variation”35 into a “systematic survey.”36 The life-world was discovered by constantly refining the main methodological instrument of phenomenology, the so-called phenomenological reduction. With this reduction, every assertion was to be suspended that could not be traced back to the immediate givenness of consciousness—above all, the “general thesis” of the transcendent existence of a world independent of consciousness. While constantly increasing the precision of this instrument of reduction, it became clear that it was not enough to “switch off” such assertions, but to “understand” them as rooted in the structures of consciousness. The concept of the “general thesis” still contains the early phenomenological notion of the possible initial position of consciousness, which, as we find it, has chosen the doxa of the real external world prematurely and without any foundation, but which might as well have relinquished this assertion or could have chosen another one altogether. What was initially supposed to be set aside in the brackets of phenomenological reduction in order to release the field of eidetic investigations independently of the factual assertion of the quotidian performance of life now is infused more and more with meaning, increasingly attracts the attention of phenomenology, and, above all, puts an end to the primacy of possibility before reality—as it originally existed in phenomenology—since the fact of a particular state of consciousness, that is, the life-world, begins to draw a unique interest. Phenomenology must return to its original task of description as soon as it has encountered this fact, although this fact too is completely assigned to the transcendental question. Fiction no longer “makes up the vital element of phenomenology,”37 and it is no longer true that “the freedom of eidetic research also necessarily demands operating in phantasy.”38 The talk of the intentionality of consciousness has itself made it necessary to explain why the consciousness does not, as it were, automatically follow its eidetic tendency until its fulfillment but must always be “brought to reason.” The “universe of obviousnesses”39 [Universum der Selbstverständlichkeiten] of which Husserl now speaks is no longer merely the contrasting concept to the “universe of conceivability”40 originally intended as the epitome of phenomenological goals. The life-world is precisely that universe which has not been chosen and cannot be chosen freely, but which one can exit only by way of a reorientation, as happened at the beginning of European intellectual history through Husserl’s “theoretical reorientation.” This world is the only worldly facticity of which one cannot also say: “I stand above the world.”41 Its validity can—precisely because the sanction of self-evidentness is part of its definition—not be suspended at will. In this, it is radically different in Husserl from the factual historical world, which may be regarded as “one of the conceptual possibilities”42 not only through free imaginative variation but with regard to whose factual process phenomenology raises the hope of revising the direction of its meaning.
At this point, it seems that we have hopelessly lost sight of our topic. For we are still and only speaking of the life-world as a stock presupposed for theoretical dismantling. What does this have to do with technization? But it is exactly here that we encounter the possibility of analyzing the problem from aspects that are unique to Husserl’s phenomenology. To be sure, the life-world is a fact that essentially conceals and hides its own facticity by pretending to be the universe of obviousnesses. At the same time, however, this means that every reorientation that steps out of this life-world—above all and in a unique way the reorientation toward the theoretical attitude—must make conspicuously apparent the very facticity of the immediately pre-given reality. Theorizing drives out the contingency of the life-world and makes it the immediate impulse of the question of why the given is just as it is, which arises for our thinking about the world no later than at the end of antiquity. Husserl did not see or no longer saw the problem of technization under this viewpoint, although his investigations suggested it. In this question, he remains bound to the naturally quite correct historical observation that modern technology would be unthinkable without the ascent of modern natural science. This relation of mutually effective conditions has long been interpreted in such a way that technology, in resorting to the purely theoretically intended result of natural science, develops its constructive possibilities autonomously, so that technology can be defined as the embodiment of theoretical results. Historically, it has become unquestionable today that the specific approach of scientific questioning at the beginning of the modern age already contains a technical element. Scientific hypotheses, according to their inherent ideal, were and are instructions for the production of the phenomena they want to explain, and the identity of the phenomenon realized in experiment is the ideal verification of the hypothesis. From this point of view, it was possible to set aside deliberately the question of whether nature took an identical or different path for realizing the phenomenon.
Husserl has taken a significant step beyond this historically well-founded conception of the genetic relationship between modern science and technology. His thesis can be formulated as follows: technization is primarily an immanently theoretical process, representing a consequence of the dismantling of the life-world, but it is not the only and legitimate one. To confirm this, Husserl wants to show something like the “inner history” of the modern age’s idea of science. For it is by no means self-evident to him that this idea had to be exemplarily realized as natural science. Rather, this process is based on a factual preliminary decision, which Husserl describes as follows: “The natural science of the modern period, establishing itself as physics, has its roots in the consistent abstraction through which it wants to see, in the life-world, only corporeity.… Through such an abstraction, carried out with universal consistency, the world is reduced to an abstract-universal nature, the subject matter of pure natural science. It is here alone that geometrical idealization, first of all, and then all further mathematizing theorization, has found its possible meaning.”43
Once again, we encounter the peculiarly voluntaristic element in the midst of Husserl’s rationalism: the selection among the life-world’s richness of meaning, the reduction of “things” to physical objects, reveals no driving motive. To be sure, Husserl speaks of the “purposive reshaping” of prescientific knowledge that happens on the foundation of the life-world, but he does not say what the purpose of such purposefulness could have been.44 Such voluntarism easily gives the impression that the fact it “founded” can again be revoked, and this factor may play a role here. But the sentence “Straightforward experience, in which the life-world is given, is the ultimate foundation of all objective knowledge”45 articulates the principled demand to understand the transformation of the life-world into an object world from impulses stemming from the life-world itself, instead of introducing something like an “original sin” in the form of an act of will that cannot be investigated. At any rate, there is nothing in Husserl’s analysis to suggest that this primary act of volition was already geared toward technization as the last in a series of steps, but it looks as though constructive availability is merely what will be the unexpected “output” of an increasing sequence of modifications and achievements. The blindness that prevails here must be recognized in its contrasting function for the idea of a teleology of European intellectual history. Man in the modern age has hurried into his technological fate with open eyes—this premise allows Husserl to seize the opportunity of making this man see again through phenomenology. It is part of that blindness of the actual wrong way modern science has taken that it has “forgotten” its own origin from the described transformation of the life-world and had to keep it in oblivion to avoid uncertainty about its claim of realizing the ultimate form of humanity’s striving for knowledge. To conceal this historical condition allows modern consciousness to believe that exact science, with the help of mathematics, could discover and present the world, usually hidden behind the phenomena, “as it truly is in itself.” Concealing the genesis of this exact world of objects through abstracting from the life-world justifies the unquestionable naturalness of this nature. In this way, the critical meaning of the life-world sought by Husserl can be seen: if it were disclosed as the universe of obviousnesses, the derivative that is “nature” would at once be discovered as only supposedly and questionably obvious. It can be seen how the whole efficacy of this complex depends on the fact that the life-world remains not responsible for the abstraction to which it has been subjected.
For Husserl, forgetting the origin of the abstract world of objects—objects that are exactly accessible in their corporeality—manifests itself in the immanent consequence of further developing their mathematical means of representation. This development has the general tendency of formalization, that is, it implies a rejection of any descriptive elements. Among the many expressions that Husserl uses for this process, it is best to use that of “the process of becoming method”:46 after all, for Husserl, “method” epitomizes tradition and the possibility of passing down achievements whose origins are now concealed.47 As soon as knowledge surpasses the capacity of a human lifetime to acquire it genuinely, the prerequisites for the acquisition of knowledge are handed down as a ready-made toolkit, and soon it becomes questionable whether the original founding achievements can be reactivated by anyone who deals with and uses them. Ancient geometry, Husserl believes, was conscious of its origin in the idealization of the physical world, but in the reception of this geometry in the beginning of the modern age, the underlying idealization was forgotten, and this circumstance gave way to the purely technical handling of the inherited tool. In the first stage of stripping away meaning, this leads to the “arithmetization of geometry.”48 In the second step, it leads to turning geometry into algebra. The final outcome is a purely formal “theory of manifolds” and the construction of a “world-in-general.”49
The takeaway of what I have just presented is that technization is a process that takes place in the theoretical substrate itself. After all, geometry has become “a mere art of achieving, through a calculating technique according to technical rules, results.”50 Novalis, for example, had already complained that true mathematics had “degenerated into mere technique [Technik] in Europe.”51 Taking recourse to a metaphor from specialized language, one could formulate this thesis as follows: the “phenotypically” quite different worlds of nature and technology represented by exact science “genotypically” have an identical structure—they are worlds made up of formulae. But this means that they share a fundamental loss of meaning, a depletion of the theoretical and constructive achievements from the acts of intuition that support and enable them. Technization is the “transformation of a formation of meaning which was originally vital” into method, which then can be passed on without carrying along the “meaning of [its] primal establishment” that has shed its “development of meaning” and does not want to acknowledge it any longer in the sufficiency of mere function.52 Primarily, technology is not a sphere of certain objects resulting from human activity. In its primordiality [Ursprünglichkeit], it is a state of human world relation itself. The dominance of the “sense of method,” however, does not only mean a functional transformation of the theoretical process, which has become detachable from its intuitive substrate and, as detached schema, can be applied to arbitrary substrates. Rather, the given state of the world for humans is adjusted and levelled. Here, Husserl uses the metaphor of the “garb of ideas,” which ensures “that we take for true being what is actually a method.”53 That technization leads to very specific objective realities—“machines” in the broadest sense—has, as a secondary phenomenon, already been decided and anticipated in that science and its method itself have become “like a machine, reliable in accomplishing obviously very useful things.”54 The real mechanism may not represent the phenomenon of technology by mere accident, but nor does it do so directly. It is no coincidence that the calculating machine belongs to the earliest dreams and attempts at realizing the modern age’s world of machines, nor is it a coincidence that the development of computers has led to a stage of perfection in which their efficiency is practically beyond the reach of the human brain. In the end, the world—which has resigned itself to dealing with what is already finished and to being monitored in the handling of the finished concepts and sentences according to the rigor of a mostly inscrutable methodology only by the success of this handling—finds itself standing helplessly before this level of production; all it does is struggle to create the space this world’s products require.
Now, it looks as if Husserl—a mathematician by origin and disposition—was intent on vilifying the feats and achievements of mathematics and the natural sciences that it made possible, as if it was only a logical step for him to hope for these achievements to be reversed. But Husserl is only concerned with making visible in exemplary fashion how disastrous in the broadest sense human action can be where it no longer knows what it is doing, and with exposing what one might call active ignorance as the root of all those disoriented activities that have produced human helplessness in the technical world. This has nothing to do with demonizing technology or assigning it the character of fate. But the irresponsibility of the purely theoretical disciplines, which accept that, by chance, they happen also to be apt to be applied, as a more or less welcome addition, is seriously challenged by a standpoint for which practice is not a form of recourse to the reservoir of theory, but that speaks of “the practice that is called theory.”55 But it is, of course, one thing to say that the line of history leading from the beginning of the modern age to technization was not fateful and inescapable, and another to say that in the present situation technization in the precise meaning Husserl gave it was a deviation of history that could still be rectified. For Husserl, both statements are closely connected: the process of the constitution of the modern age is not clearly determined; it contains an ambivalence.
Husserl identifies the decisive figure of the early modern period in Galileo, with whom “the surreptitious substitution of idealized nature for prescientifically intuited nature” begins.56 Galileo is characterized as “at once a discovering and a concealing genius.”57 This formulation seems to me to hold a very deep insight. Discovery and concealment are inseparable in the history of the modern age’s achievements. Is it, however, something of a law of modern intellectual history that each of its discoveries was won only at the price of concealing something else? Husserl would have answered in the negative; he only sees a coupling in fact, not principle, only the actual succumbing to temptation—the temptation of the shortest path, of the perfect function. But for him, appealing to the origin remains possible and the demand of reactivating the sense continuum can still be fulfilled. Even his language shows this: it is about concealment, not destruction, and it is a gentle image for the lost context of meaning when Husserl says that science “hovers as if in empty space above the life-world.”58 The position of phenomenological analysis cannot be pushed until it reaches its antithesis.
This brings us back to our starting point: in the work of Husserl, technology is no longer understood as an antithesis to nature. Now we can say: it is understood from the perspective of a relationship to history. In technization, as Husserl understands it, man evades the integrity of the intelligible, that is, originally intuitive, performance of his praxis in the broad sense that includes theory as well. He wants to move ahead, so to speak, “in leaps.” He omits history. This can also be framed more rigorously in phenomenological terms: in technization, man limits himself to the possibilities of the understanding and eludes the claim of reason. This Kantian conceptual difference Husserl applied onto the intentionality of consciousness: reason is fulfilled intention, perfect possession of the object in the abundance of its aspects, or at least the keeping-oneself-open for this abundance. The understanding is dealing with empty intentions, with beliefs that are taken to be the things themselves, or, in a banking metaphor popular with Husserl, a “method of exchange and conversion, which is based upon mere treasury bonds.”59 The essential inner disposition of consciousness, by virtue of its intentionality, is “bringing the discursive understanding to reason” at all times so as to exchange the treasury bonds for the assets that they cover.60 History executes and actualizes this disposition, but technization disrupts this process, constantly increasing the “sign values,” the nominal representations, the uncovered bonds; it is, to stay with this metaphor, the bringing-about of ownership rather than the justification of property, or exercising domination without any regard to its legitimacy.
I would like to give an example of what this actually recognizes and reveals about the issue at hand. I shall choose the primitive example of a doorbell. There are the old mechanical models operated by pulling a cord or turning a knob: when using such a bell, I still have the immediate feeling of producing the intended effect in its specificity, since there is an adequate nexus between the hand that activates it and the sound that rings. That means that if I am standing in front of such a mechanism, I know not just what I am to do, but also why I am to do it. The case is different for the electrical bell, which is activated by a push button: the action of the hand is assigned to the effect heteromorphically and without any specificity—we no longer produce the effect, but only trigger it. The desired effect is kept ready for our use, available for us, as it were, within the design of the apparatus; indeed, it carefully hides its conditionality and the complexity of its realization from us in order to suggest itself to us as something effortlessly available. For the sake of this suggestion of the always-ready, the technical world, regardless of all its functional requirements, is a sphere of casings, disguises, nonspecific façades, and blinds. The functional part that is still human is homogenized and reduced to the ideal minimum of pushing a button. Technization makes human practices increasingly unspecific. To be sure, I am not saying anything about the simple physical fact that the difference between a mechanical and an electric doorbell objectively lies in that, in the one case, we have to supply the energy for the process itself, while in the other, we are tapping into available external energy. What is crucial in the present context is the phenomenological aspect: how does what is given to immediate experience present itself to us. In the ideal of “at the touch of a button,” the withdrawal of insight (in the most literal sense of looking inside!) celebrates itself: direction and effect, command and product, will and deed have been moved together at the shortest distance, coupled as effortlessly as in the secret ideal of all post-Christian productivity, the divine “Let there be …!” of the beginning of the Bible. In a world that is increasingly characterized by triggering functions, not only the interchangeability of the people needed for nonspecific actions increases, but also the likelihood of confusing the triggers. To abide by our door bell: How often don’t you press the bell button in a stairwell when you in fact had “meant” the light switch? Behind each such trigger lies a long history of human discovery, a whole complex of inventive achievements, but the trigger is “packaged” in a way that it conceals this history and deprives it from us in its abstract uniformity—a “product” that offers up its inner workings for all to see is a poor product indeed. The self-presentation of the technical object not only rejects all curious questions by treating them as possible investigations by someone who does not want to pay the price for the secret function or wants to profit from it himself; moreover, it seems to do everything in its power not to let questions arise in the first place—and not just questions concerning the secrets of its design and its functional principle, but above all, questions concerning its right to exist. The ever-ready that can be triggered and retrieved at the touch of a button does not justify its existence either by reference to its theoretical origin or to the needs and impulses of life, which it purports to serve. It is legitimized by being ordered, accepted, transferred, and put into operation. The fact of availability, however, does not presuppose the existence of meaningful needs—rather, it itself demands and coerces the existence of new needs and meanings. For this purpose, a whole layer of motivations and fictions of validity must then be created artificially and with technical effort. The ideal of such manipulation is to shroud the artificial product with obviousness; it silences all questions regarding necessity, meaning, humaneness, and justifiability. The artificial reality, the foreigner among the encountered things of nature, sinks back into the “universe of what is pre-given as obvious,” the life-world.61
The connection between life-world and technization is more complicated than Husserl believed it to be. The process of concealing what has been discovered, as analyzed by Husserl, reaches its telos only when what has become unconscious through theoretical inquiry returns to being unquestionable. The technical as such becomes incomparably more invisible by being implanted into the life-world than through the mimicry of casings and covers. Technization not only ruptures the foundational context of theoretical behavior emerging from the life-world, but it in turn begins to control the life-world by making the sphere in which we do not yet ask questions identical with that in which we no longer ask questions, and by regulating and motivating the occupation of this sphere of things through the immanent dynamics of the technically always-ready, that is, through the irrevocability of production which puts itself on equal footing with the forces of nature. The process of technization discloses its own “teleology” in that it makes life its own dependent quantity not only by producing things and achievements but also by making producible the unproducible, that is, obviousness.
Here I shall suspend the analysis that was to demonstrate the contribution of phenomenology to the question of the “thing itself” and instead follow Husserl’s real interest in this problem in the Crisis essay—an interest that is, at first glance, directed at therapy rather than diagnosis. In a situation in which Husserl himself was condemned to silence in Germany, and in which his phenomenology had already been drowned by the wave of existential ontology, he is full of faith in this philosophy’s secular mission. For Husserl, the therapy for the crisis that had come to fruition in technization cannot lie in reversing or even just stopping a development on whose respective final results the possibility of human existence has become more and more dependent. But to Husserl, therapy quite indubitably means that something needs to be “caught up on.” This idea to repeat or catch up on a genesis—which, in the end, is always the intentionality of consciousness itself—is essentially connected with the project of phenomenology. If the analysis of technization revealed that in its process the authentic justification of all its steps had been missed, omitted, and skipped, then the attitude of phenomenology almost automatically offers itself as a therapeutic countermove, in which the inquiries into the foundations, into the meaning of the primal establishment and the resulting explication of meaning can be caught up on, for they were forgotten and glossed over in technization. Phenomenology wants to restore history—history in an absolute sense. Its basic demand is to “repeat the entire history … of the subjective activities.”62 Phenomenological knowledge is the radical remedy to a radical crisis, and it is so by itself, by the sheer presence of its late realization in European intellectual history—that’s how Husserl sees it. It counteracts the immanent structure and the growth of the critical process like an antibiotic, as it were. It constitutes a resistance against the formalization of theoretical achievements that grounds the essence of technization, so that it can “never undergo the unnoticed transformation into a mere technē,”63 but is able to accomplish “reactivating the original activities”64 that can retrieve science, which has been “lowered to the status of art or technē”65 into the bindingness of theoretical responsibility—if we indulge Husserl’s faith for a moment. Phenomenology itself, as “intuitive knowledge,” is “that form of reason that sets itself the task of bringing the discursive understanding to reason.”66
In the midst of the technical age and the technized world, it is a testament to the great, indeed magnificent, confidence of the aged Husserl to have extracted—in the forty thousand pages of his self-reflective protocols—the antitoxin of the technization that terrifies him. He contrasts the always-ready with the always-beginning of philosophical thought, which alone “takes up a new will to life,”67 and opposes a world that demonstrates itself to be meaningful only by hinting at the facticity of its enormous presence with the call to remain faithful to oneself in the teleological consistency of an identical, once-grasped meaning.68
An engagement with the ideas Husserl develops in his Crisis should not mean again to abandon what phenomenological investigation has without a doubt achieved here, and what could most fruitfully be presented as an immanent critique. It seems to be a lasting insight to me that technization—in the sense of a loss of self-understanding and self-responsibility—is a transformation originating in the bosom of the total process of theory. What seems less certain to me is that this transformation should, with Husserl, be seen as a pathological phenomenon, as a modification deliberately posited or factually erupting in consciousness, as an aberration in the self-actualization of consciousness’ intentionality. This assumption alone made it possible for Husserl alone to offer his phenomenology as a therapy. But is this assumption correct? I shall answer this question from Husserl’s own premises.
In Husserl’s view of history, the teleology “immanent in the history of Europe”69 begins with the Greeks as a new “interest in the All.”70 This new interest contained “intentional infinities,”71 which could become effective and real only in a humanity “which, living in finitude, lives toward poles of infinity.”72 In this formula, Husserl has articulated a decisive antinomy that dominates his own phenomenology as well without being noticed. As early as 1913, Husserl writes that in the intentionality of consciousness every given property of a thing “draws us into infinities of experience: that every experiential multiplicity, no matter how extensive, still leaves open more precise and novel determinations of the physical thing, and it does so in infinitum.”73 By necessity, however, this being-draw-in eludes fulfillment; the talk of an “infinite work” and “infinite tasks” runs through the whole work of the founder of phenomenology. What he sees before him are “veritable infinities of facts … never explored prior to phenomenology”;74 when he speaks of the “infinity of executing work,”75 one does not perceive any terror; in general, “work” is one of the characteristic words of Husserl’s language.76 The idea that underlay the early promise of a Philosophy as a Rigorous Science (1910) was a final self-evidence that can be attained in all areas; it now has split into a complicated plurality of self-evidences, and it “may be left open” whether the adequate evidence “does not necessarily lie at infinity.”77 If it is true that the modern age has brought to light the consequence of the “idea of an infinity of tasks”78 that was latent in the ancient concept of science, then Husserl’s phenomenology is an extreme escalation of this infinite claim imposed on a finite existence. The pathos of the idea of infinity obscures this contradiction: the demand for the absolute self-evidence and radicalism of justifications and genetic analyses of meaning puts itself in the wrong before the idea of the demanded infinite theoretical work. Self-evidence and radicalism of justifications require that thought return to the absolute beginning—and that it do so for every existence wishing to become transparent to itself, just as Descartes had demanded with his semel in vita funditus denuo [once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations].79 Against this, the infinity of work to be done requires that what has historically been achieved can be made the precondition for what remains to be achieved—that is to say, it requires its functionalization as a possession of knowledge that merely needs to be learned and can be adopted as a methodology. Only thus can the starting point of progress be pushed ever further into the untrodden. Thus, formalization is nothing but the most handy, most serviceable kind of functionalization of what has already been achieved; but in this, it is potentially technization, for what can be formalized—that is: what gains its applicability independently of any insight into its actual execution—that is at bottom already mechanized, even if no actual mechanisms for its preservation and regulated association have been available. All methodology seeks to create unreflected repeatability, a growing foundation of presuppositions that may always be involved but is not always actualized. There is no escape from this antinomy between philosophy and science: philosophy’s ideal of knowledge defies methodization, science as a finite being’s infinite claim impels it. The last time philosophy and science appeared to be in harmony with each other was in the scholastic illusion of reason disavowing itself because of its curiosity. The separation of philosophy and science—brought about by the philosophical idea of science itself—marked the transition to technization in the modern sense that is heterogeneous to all previous human technology. But this separation was necessary and legitimate. Here, the critique of Husserl’s position takes shape. The loss of meaning of which Husserl spoke is in truth renunciation of meaning imposed by the consequence of the theoretical pretension itself. One cannot rhapsodize about “mankind’s development as it becomes mankind with infinite tasks”80 and at the same time deny the price for this becoming.
Husserl might have already studied this problem in his great hero, Descartes, who had initially believed that the realization of his scientific program could be a matter of one lifetime, his own. The treaty on method is already the result of thorough resignation, for it primarily indicates the process by which one can make available to other members of a human race engaged in research over a succession of generations what has been achieved in such a way as not to recreate the philosophical original situation of the radical beginning anew each time. Against this implication of the idea of method, the thought that preparing the chain of deductions for increasingly faster processing that is increasingly less dependent on a deceptive memory—analogous to the number series—is an episodic if quite telling element, for here we can sense the hesitation before the step into formalization. Leibniz was probably the first to develop this whole problem in his argument with Descartes.81 He confronts Descartes’s ideal of knowledge—supposedly derived from mathematics and according to which no further step of deduction may be made without the full rigor of proof—with the actual procedure of geometry since Euclid, which had accepted many renunciations of proof and thus became an ars progrediendi [technique of progress]. If it had postponed the elaboration of its theorems and problems until all axioms and postulates had been proved, perhaps there would still be no geometry today—foregoing proof and postponing the strictest demands serve as conditions of possibility of the progress of knowledge.
In Husserl’s own phenomenological analyses, too, there is no lack of elements of unsatisfiability that arise from the antinomy of infinity and intuition. In the syntheses of empirical intuition, a selection of the thing’s aspects happens always and necessarily; in the continuum of adumbrations [Abschattungen] leaps are made, as it were, because the ideal equivalent to pure intuition in the empirical ideal of going through all possible perspectives cannot be fulfilled. “The pure intuition that corresponds to an empirical thing is denied to us, it lies hidden after a fashion in the complete synthetic intuition itself, but as it were dispersedly, with a perpetual admixture of signitive representation.”82
But that means that at the lowest elemental level of its achievements, the human intellect is always already engaged in formalization. It is almost inevitable that Husserl could not, even with the pathos of the Crisis treatise, conceal the conflicting nature of intentionality between progress and fulfilled intuition. The solution that he hints at amounts to a kind of vicarious function of philosophy for science: what science, in its impetuous progression, omits and skips over, philosophy catches up on and harvests. At least this is how the following text, both important and obscure, can be understood: “Actually the process whereby material mathematics is put into formal-logical form, where expanded formal logic is made self-sufficient as pure analysis or theory of manifolds, is perfectly legitimate, indeed necessary; the same is true of the technization that from time to time completely loses itself in merely technical thinking. But all this can and must be a method which is understood and practiced in a fully conscious way. It can be this, however, only if care is taken to avoid dangerous shifts of meaning by keeping always immediately in mind the original bestowal of meaning upon the method, through which it has the sense of achieving knowledge about the world. Even more, it must be freed of the character of an unquestioned tradition that, from the first invention of the new idea and method, allowed elements of obscurity to flow into its meaning.”83
This arguably means, or at least could mean, that the legitimacy technization is granted here establishes a historically new role of philosophy that is no longer preceptory (for it now is catching up on the consequences of its own anticipation): it is supposed vicariously to administer the treasure of the structures of meaning that technization has skipped.
I would like to place the complex of the phenomenological interpretation of technology in a larger historical context. The implication of infinity within phenomenology belongs to the well-established tradition of our intellectual history that can be called Platonism. A self-evidence attainable only in infinity has a meaning that touches on human existence only in a mental structure in which truth is not only recognized as absolute value, but also stands in a conditional relation to the fulfillment of human existence. Adequate self-evidence as the goal of every intellectual journey—historically speaking, the unmediated intuition of ideas—is the core of any Platonism. But this also explains why Plato’s rejection of Sophism implied the exclusion of technology from the intellectual legitimacy of the European tradition. For sophism had developed the idea of a formal ability, of an unspecific intellectual potency—that is, the mastery of a thing detached from understanding the thing—and, at bottom, made omnipotence the ideal of its educational practice, to which it assigned everything theoretical in advance. What had manifested itself in Sophist rhetoric and dialectic (tellingly, it was in the tradition of these disciplines that the terminology of technical behavior and technical achievements has been developed) was the most arbitrary transferability of a formal skill applicable to any concrete end—pure “method,” that is. The Socratic-Platonic objection not only rejected this primacy of pure skill but has not even left any ground on which purely formal powers might be included in the image of a fulfilled human existence. This has determined our tradition, right down to the formation of the Christian idea of eternal bliss as visio beatifica [beatific vision] in the perfect identity of theory and happiness. Husserl’s “infinite task” provides the same answer to the question of the ultimate meaning of human existence, with the admittedly decisive difference that in view of the infinite task, the individual, concrete human being can neither be necessarily fulfilling nor fulfilled, but can enter into a context that overarches him only as a functionary. The infinity of theory as “research” [Forschung] requires transferability, methodization, formalization, and technization. The Sophist position reappears at a certain point on Platonic ground: the concrete human being is not at all the subject of an infinite task; this subject must be artificially constituted in the form of society, nation, humanity, science—and as a principle of ruthlessness against the individual’s claim to happiness at that. Before technized industrial society had functionalized man, the modern idea of science had already carried out this elementary act of modern history by way of example. The transcendental self-investigation of subjectivity initiated by Husserl is one of the attempts—and perhaps the most important—to restitute the lost substance. But the fate of phenomenology itself is marked not only by what has happened to it from the outside, but also by the awareness it raised to a significant extent that the philosophical subject stands lost before its own pretension to radical self-foundation and infinite self-justification.
Phenomenology, as has been shown, cannot escape the consequences whose premises it has itself brought to light so clearly. The emergence from the life-world, that is, from the “universe of obviousnesses,” was not only the beginning of the European intellectual process which Husserl saw culminating in his own phenomenology; it was also the reversal of all of reality’s characteristics of self-evidence into contingency. Contingency means the appraisal of reality from the standpoint of necessity and possibility. The awareness of reality’s contingency is, however, the foundation of a technical attitude toward what is given: if the given world is only an arbitrary segment from the infinite scope of the possible, if the sphere of natural facts no longer exerts a higher justification and sanction, then the world’s facticity becomes the nagging impulse not only to judge and criticize the real from the perspective of the possible, but also to augment merely factual reality by way of realizing the possible, of exhausting the latitude of invention and construction, to form a cultural world that is in itself consistent and can be justified through necessity. Thus, if we have to consider contingency as a stimulant to the realization of the demiurgical potency of man, then it becomes clear how the technical pathos of the modern age could arise in correspondence to the extreme increase of the consciousness of contingency in the late Middle Ages.84 This statement makes even clearer the critical function that the concept of the “life-world” assumed in Husserl’s engagement with modern technization. This concept of the life-world is formed as the virtual embodiment of all opposing characteristics to a world of contingency, but also to a world whose inner necessity has become possible only in the assertion against the consciousness of the facticity of the world—and that is, against a technical world. That Husserl should have investigated this life-world in the late phase of his thinking, even before the problem of technization had become acute for him, was an urgency that arose out of the immanent development of phenomenology itself. The phenomenological method—and this is now decisive for our train of thought—is, after all, itself a paradigm of the consciousness of contingency, of that basic process in the spiritual substratum of the technical world one could describe as “dismantling of obviousness” [Entselbstverständlichung]. To call into question even the last and most hidden self-evidences could almost be stated as the program of phenomenology. To make the life-world itself an object of theoretical description means, after all, not saving and preserving this sphere, but, in the process of disclosing it, the inevitable destruction of its essential attribute of obviousness. The term that is critically needed and searched for cannot be found without undoing the thing. For the phenomenologist, the task is “transforming the universal obviousness of the being of the world—for him, the greatest of all enigmas—into something intelligible.”85
Thus, to determine the theoretical location of phenomenology—according to which “we place ourselves above this whole life and all this cultural tradition and, by radical sense-investigations, seek for ourselves singly and in common the ultimate possibilities and necessities, on the basis of which we can take our position toward actualities in judging, valuing, and acting”—means nothing but to intensify contingency.86
A philosophy of “absolute universality within which there must be no unasked questions, nothing taken for granted that is not understood,”87 fulfills with its pretension the “telos of intentionality,”88 but in doing so, it renders those questions virulent that cannot be put off for answers residing in unattainable infinities, which by their nature do not tolerate the delay of theory but provoke man’s anticipating-beyond-himself that cannot be caught up with by philosophy, which is precisely what Husserl has shown to be the nature of technology.
Husserl has been said to have been “totally devoid of any sense of history.”89 But while it was believed that this lack could be recognized in the fact that Husserl was only able to project the historical figures of philosophy to the level of his own needs, this lack rather reveals itself in the fact that he misjudged the historical role and position of his own phenomenology: he sought what is essentially invariable with the methodological instruments of reduction and free variation, “the example … freed of all its factualness,” “the indissolubly identical in the different and ever-again different, the essence common to all,”90 and in so doing he articulated the freedom of the means rather than the necessity of the end, executing the spirit of the modern age while believing to turn it against the modern age, as that variation, which is “carried on with the freedom of pure phantasy and with the consciousness of its purely optional character,” so that “the variation extends into an open horizon of endlessly manifold free possibilities of more and more variants.”91
Already on the level of language, this talk of the “fully free variation, released from all restrictions to facts accepted beforehand,”92 resembles the modern age’s solemn formulae of emancipation, which all share in the illusion of freeing oneself from the factual in order to arrive at the essential; in effect, they always only accentuated the insuperable obtrusiveness of the factual. We may thus regard the idealized “life-world” in Husserl’s thinking as the correlate to and corrective for the increase in contingency unnoticed in technization.93
The contemporary significance of the phenomenological analysis of technology has become immensely increased in a very current problem that Husserl had not yet noticed and which is almost something like an experimental isolation of the whole complex: the globalized grafting of European science and technology onto peoples and cultural worlds once considered exotic. Here, technization does not appear as a leap out of the continuum of theoretical performance, which stands in a foundational context with the life-world; rather, it is an exogenous superimposition of often almost untouched life-worlds, of codifications of understanding and behavior that are enclosed in obviousness. The motivation that has been called “civilatory impatience”94 has in this case not grown from the consciousness of the “infinite task” but was induced by what has been called “international demonstration effect.”95 The tremendous accelerations that have become technically necessary in the syndrome called “underdevelopment” create tensions which are rendered understandable precisely through Husserl’s idea of the process of meaning catching up on history, but which at the same time make comprehensible an affinity to an ideology which has demonstrated spectacularly, and continues to do so, how suited it is as a justification for the kind of industrialization eager to make up for lost time. From the perspective of our immanent critique of Husserl’s position, the problem of catch-up development does not lie so much in the exogenous supply of technical means and civilizatory behaviors, but rather in the absence of the inherent motivations to accept and assimilate this supply: the motivations themselves are supplied externally, but they would have to be developed endogenously. The result our study was unable to produce for the European modern age—an approach that would allow one to speak of a “pathology of technology”—may still turn out to be a severe desideratum on a global scale in the late phase of technization.
Technology is, phenomenally speaking, a realm of mechanisms. To understand it as the “thing itself” it is not enough to classify this realm, to investigate its effects and side effects, and to trace its enabling conditions back to the knowledge of the laws of nature. All mechanisms are ultimately designed to enhance a finite given capacity, that of human existence; they extend, if one may say so, the scope of each existence spatially and temporally, they allow us to take leaps instead of steps. The radicalism of the question, up to the threshold of which Husserl advanced his analysis, lies in the fact that it asks for the historical emergence of the motivation for and the will to this increase in finitude. Technization arises from the tension between the theoretical task, which has revealed itself as infinite, and the capacity of existence found in man that is given as a constant. The antinomy of technology consists in the tension between achievement and insight. Phenomenology—in the form Husserl gave it—has not resolved this antinomy but has exacerbated it and made it more perceptible and effective for our intellectual situation.
Translated by Hannes Bajohr
Originally published as “Lebenswelt und Technisierung unter Aspekten der Phänomenologie,” Filosofia 14, no. 4 (1963): 855–884; from Hans Blumenberg, Schriften zur Technik, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015), 17–29.
1. [Paul Valéry, “Note and Digression,” in Leonardo Poe Mallarmé, trans. M. Cowley and J. R. Lawler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 79.]
2. [John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), esp. chaps. 7 and 20.]
3. [Ernst Kapp, Elements of a Philosophy of Technology: On the Evolutionary History of Culture, ed. Jeffrey West Kirkwood and Leif Weatherby (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). The motto is by Edmund Reitlinger.]
4. See “The General Society of the Human Race,” the first version of the second chapter of the Social Contract (from the “Geneva Manuscript”), which was not included in the definitive version. In this context, Kant adopted the term “perfected art” (art perfectionné) from Rousseau and reshaped it in such a way that “perfect art once more becomes nature.” Immanuel Kant, Handschriftlicher Nachlaß: Anthropologie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1923), 2.1:887, 896. “Art” here is the totality of the form of life made possible by freedom: “Morality is a matter of art and not of nature” (Kant, “Reflexion 1454,” in Handschriftlicher Nachlaß: Anthropologie, 636). Of course, through artificiality the passage leads “once more” to nature only in a formal sense, that is, to the materially perfectly heterogeneous correlate of a, in turn, “purposive establishment” as a “system of happiness” (Kant, “Reflexion 1454,” 869). The goal of constituting such a formal congruence is the regulative meaning of considering the state of nature, which is Rousseau’s “life-world”: “Rousseau does not want that one returns [zurückgehen] to the state of nature but only that one looks back [zurücksehen] at it” (Kant, “Reflexion 1454,” 890). It may be this difference between a single letter that kindles the greatest number of misunderstandings and the fiercest fallings-out in the political and intellectual situation issuing from Rousseau in the following two centuries.
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Geneva Manuscript,” in “The Social Contract” and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 153–161; 159.
6. My first work on the problem of technology still adopted the traditional antithesis naturally as a topic: “The Relation between Nature and Technology as Philosophical Problem” [in this volume]. A different approach then came with the Brussels conference paper “Technology and Truth” (“Technik und Wahrheit,” in Actes du XIème Congrès International de Philosophie (Bruxelles, 20–26 août 1953): Epistémologie [Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1952], 2:113–120).
7. Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 203–207.
8. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 451 (V, 932).
9. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 467 (V, 1120).
10. Lucretius, 453 (V, 960).
11. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
12. Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), 156, 164.
13. [Edmund Husserl, “Beilage XVIII,” Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976), 464. This supplementary text is not part of the English translation.]
14. Husserl, “Beilage XVIII,” 464.
15. Husserl, Crisis, 305–306.
16. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 2:253. In retrospect, Husserl recognized the starting point for further developing the problem of the world and the horizon in his Logical Investigations in the fact that he “could not finish with occasional judgments and their signification.” (Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 199). Indeed, everything leads toward “transferring” [Übertragung] the structure of intentionality from the objective immanence onto the objective transcendence, that is, onto the intentionality of “situational horizons” (Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 199), and so forth. What for the eidetic ideal is bothersome—the occasionality of meanings—reveals itself to be conditioned by the irresolvable fact that every experience has its “horizon of unregarded mental processes” (Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, 2 vols., trans. Fred Kersten [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983], 1:197). That the absent is co-given has the function of “an idea in the Kantian sense” (Husserl, Ideas, 197). Husserl calls it an “eidetically valid and evidential statement that no concrete mental process can be accepted as self-sufficient in the full sense” (Husserl, Ideas, 198; translation altered).
17. [Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2:247, 212.]
18. Edmund Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” in Crisis, 353–378.
19. Husserl, “The Origin of Geometry,” 371.
20. Husserl, 378.
21. Husserl, 371.
22. See Ludwig Landgrebe, “Husserl’s Departure from Cartesianism,” in The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays, ed. Donn Welton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 6–121.
23. Husserl, Crisis, 281.
24. Husserl, 280.
25. [Husserl, Krisis, 533; not part of the English translation.]
26. [“Aufgabenidee,” Husserl, Krisis, 442; not part of the English translation.]
27. In all of phenomenology, the “continuity” between the natural life of consciousness and its fulfillment in self-evidence is so obvious that one could speak of “science in the historically oldest sense” as of a “naively straightforwardly effected work of theoretical reason” (Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1). And self-evidence could be determined as “an all-pervasive teleological structure, a pointedness toward ‘reason’ and even a pervasive tendency toward it” (Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 160). But the great ethical claim of the Crisis project demanded something like a responsible and binding act of will at the beginning of our “actual” history.
28. Husserl, Crisis, 180.
29. [Husserl, 88.]
30. Husserl, 180.
31. Husserl, 183.
32. [Husserl, 86.]
33. Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie: Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1956), 1:184.
34. Husserl, Crisis, 141.
35. Husserl, 49.
36. Husserl, 147.
37. Husserl, Ideas, 169 [the word Fiktion is translated as “feigning” there].
38. Husserl, 168.
39. [Husserl, “Beilage XV,” Krisis, 451. This supplementary text is not part of the English translation.]
40. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 249.
41. Husserl, Crisis, 152.
42. Husserl, 375.
43. Husserl, 227.
44. Husserl, 226.
45. Husserl, 226.
46. Husserl, 67.
47. Husserl, 367.
48. Husserl, 45.
49. Husserl, 45–46.
50. Husserl, 46.
51. Novalis, Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969), 3:295. [Technik could equally be translated with “technology” or “technics.”]
52. Husserl, Crisis, 56–58.
53. Husserl, 51. I discuss the “garb of ideas” metaphor in Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 75.
54. Husserl, Crisis, 52.
55. Husserl, “Beilage XIV,” Krisis, 449. [This supplementary text is not part of the English translation.]
56. Husserl, Crisis, 49–50.
57. Husserl, 52.
58. Husserl, “Beilage XIV,” Krisis, 448.
59. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Springer, 1999), 46.
60. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 46.
61. [Husserl, Crisis, 180.]
62. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe, trans. Spencer Churchill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973) 49.
63. [Husserl, Crisis, 199.]
64. [Husserl, 366.]
65. [Husserl, 197.]
66. [Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, 46.]
67. Husserl, “Beilage XX,” Krisis, 472. [This supplementary text is not part of the English translation.]
68. Husserl, “Beilage XXIV,” Krisis, 486. [This supplementary text is not part of the English translation.]
69. Husserl, Crisis, 274.
70. Husserl, 276.
71. Husserl, 277.
72. Husserl, 277.
73. Husserl, Ideas, 9.
74. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), 41.
75. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 88.
76. One could extract a whole world of workshops and workplaces from Husserl’s vocabulary, often in dense accumulation, for instance: Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 142, 144, 146, 147, 150, 191, 204. The almost ecstatic plural of the “veritable infinities of descriptive work” is also telling (Husserl, Erste Philosophie, 110). Helmuth Plessner was right in characterizing phenomenology as a “way to integrate philosophy into the modern world of work.” Helmuth Plessner, Husserl in Göttingen: Rede zur Feier des 100. Geburtstages Edmund Husserls (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1959), 9.
77. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 15.
78. [Husserl, Crisis, 278.]
79. [René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 15; Blumenberg gives a condensed version of Descartes’s sentence.]
80. Husserl, Crisis, 279.
81. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Critical Thoughts on the General Part of the Principles of Descartes,” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 383–412; 384. Against Descartes, Leibniz presents the paradigm provided by the mathematicians: “If they had tried to put off the discovery of theorems and problems until all the axioms and postulates had been proved, we should perhaps have no geometry today” (Leibniz, “Critical Thoughts,” 384).
82. Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2:248. The talk of the intuition of the empirical thing that is “denied to us” appears here still to hint at Husserl leaving open the possibility of an originary intellect in the Kantian sense. His later eidetic description of the physical object posits its discursive constitution as absolute (see Husserl, Ideas, 1:363); this does not change anything about the fact that for the finite intellect, discourse is by necessity deficient and its “gaps” are signitive bridges.
83. Husserl, Crisis, 47. [The original emphases have been restored.]
84. I have substantiated this thesis in: “ ‘Imitation of Nature’: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being” [in this volume]; “Ordnungsschwund und Selbstbehauptung: Über Weltverstehen und Weltverhalten im Werden der technischen Epoche,” Das Problem der Ordnung: Verhandlungen des Siebten Deutschen Kongresses für Philosophie, Münster 1962, ed. Helmut Kuhn and Fritz Wiedmann (Meisenheim: Hain, 1962), 37–57; “Kontingenz,” Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr, 1959), 3:1793–1794.
85. Husserl, Crisis, 180.
86. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 5–6.
87. Husserl, Crisis, 265.
88. Husserl, “Textkritische Anmerkungen zum Haupttext,” Krisis, 533. [These editorial notes are not part of the English translation.]
89. Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?,” Essays in Understanding, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 1994), 166.
90. Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 248.
91. Husserl, 247–248.
92. Husserl, 248.
93. For the concept of the life-world, see Aron Gurwitsch, “The Last Work of Edmund Husserl II: The Lebenswelt,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 17 (1957): 370–398. Analogies to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “natural worldview” and the problem of natural languages in neopositivism are drawn in Hermann Lübbe, “ ‘Sprachspiele’ und ‘Geschichten’: Neopositivismus und Phänomenologie im Spätstadium,” Kant-Studien 52 (1960/61): 220–243.
94. [Hans Raupach, “Die Sowjetwirtschaft als historisches Phänomen,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 10, no. 1 (1962): 15.]
95. [Ragnar Nurkse, Problems of Capital Formation in Underdeveloped Countries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), 65.]