Both Husserl and Sellars have ambitious programs for philosophy; they each consider philosophy as the main cultural force. For them philosophy has a historical mission, and this mission is not defined by a moral or political goal, but by a theoretical or epistemic task. Philosophy has to create the unity and ultimate transparency of human knowledge. The epistemic ideals of unity and transparency are old and were first articulated by Descartes. In this chapter, I will discuss how both Husserl and Sellars want to realize these ideals using a certain type of history of knowledge. Their conceptions are comparable because they both use similar conceptual dichotomies to characterize the difference between scientific and nonscientific knowledge. In the second part of this chapter, I will criticize these attempts as not doing justice to the complexity of the social and emotional setting in which knowledge develops.
The philosophical accomplishments of Husserl and Sellars are great. Phenomenology, Husserl’s philosophical creation, has become one of the strongest intellectual traditions of the twentieth century in philosophy, sociology, and cultural anthropology, and it was the starting point of philosophical schools like existentialism. The power of Sellars’s transformation of the philosophy of the late Wittgenstein has only just now become entirely obvious in the inferential semantics of Robert Brandom. In the following, I will not deal with these obvious credits to Husserl’s and Sellars’s thought, but with something that seems to lie more on the periphery of their work.
It is the merit of both to have seen that for a “complete” view of the world, fact and values, objectivity and subjectivity need to be brought together. This is an insight that is present today especially in the neopragmatism of Putnam. But Husserl and Sellars also recognized that there is a tension and a conflict between our search for facts and objectivity and our desire to understand values and subjective perspectives. They gave names to the sides that produce this tension: the manifest image and the scientific image (Sellars) and Galilean science and the life-world (Husserl). In their awareness of the conflicts in modern Western culture, they were perhaps more advanced than some neo-pragmatists. In this chapter their view of the difficulty of relating scientific and nonscientific knowledge is not only analyzed but also criticized for being still too simple. This criticism is not meant to be destructive. Although their general diagnosis is right, it will need much more sophistication and is to be connected with a humbler view of the cultural possibilities of philosophical texts in order to lead to some “therapy.”
Husserl and Sellars see a disunity and opacity in the knowledge of their own times: a disunity between a science dealing with facts and the “problems of reason,” as Husserl calls them, in which values and meaning are to be found (Crisis, § 3). Connecting facts with ideals, values, and meaning (Sinn) is the primordial task of philosophy, according to Husserl. In a very similar spirit Wilfrid Sellars writes in his “Introduction to the Philosophy of Science” from 1964:
There is some measure of truth in ... [the idea of a unified science], but it overlooks, among other things, another dimension of philosophy. We want to understand in philosophy not only what is the case and how the world of fact operates, but we also want to understand how this relates to human living, human values and obligations, to the experience of beauty and to religious experience. Thus, even if the sciences are integrating themselves, there still remains the task of seeing how the world of facts and the world of value fit together. (1964, 3)1
Sellars does not question the idea of a unified science, but thinks it will not solve the problems of disunity that the advocates of a unified science believe it would solve. The disunity between fact and value, or fact and meaning, results from the supposed incompatibility of two realms of knowledge: the realm of scientific knowledge and the realm of nonscientific knowledge. Husserl’s life-world (Lebenswelt) as the realm of sense or meaning serves a similar function in his philosophical setting as does what Sellars calls the “original image” and the “manifest image” in his essay “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962). The unification of the realm of ideals with the realm of fact under the intellectual leadership of philosophy will bring European mankind, according to Husserl, to its final goal. Therefore philosophers are for Husserl “functionaries of mankind” (Funktionäre der Menschheit), who carry the responsibility for the “true being of mankind” (wahre Sein der Menschheit), which is to be found in the telos of a final state of man, where the dichotomy between fact and value has been dissolved and knowledge has become entirely self-transparent (Crisis, § 7). This telos is an ideal for the never-ending phenomenological work required under Husserl’s conception of historical reconstructions of the meaning of scientific terms, all of which for him are initially derived from what one would usually call ordinary experience. Following Husserl, in this chapter I will refer to these ordinary experiences as the life-world.
For Sellars, a possible final state of the development of knowledge, in the sense of a fusion or synoptic vision of the scientific and the manifest images, seems to be a real possibility. But today, statements about a final goal of knowledge reached via philosophy appear to be an enormous overestimation of the cultural role and force of philosophy, and these statements are as hard to understand as their teleological background. But as is well known, Martin Heidegger, and especially the late Heidegger, not only took over but intensified this overestimation of the cultural mission of philosophy. This is evident in his texts about the relevance of thinking and in those where he suggests that the whole history of mankind, especially the history of science and of technology, as far as it is influenced by Europe, are the result of Seinsvergessenheit, the forgetting of Being; that is, for him history is interpreted mainly as a history of philosophy with different epiphenomena. For example, technology appears in this particular history as a form of metaphysics (Gestalt der Metaphysik).
Sellars does not talk about mankind. But he says that man created himself. When man produced the manifest image, he made it possible to distinguish between things and persons. According to Sellars, this distinction disappears in the scientific image. So the question of whether the scientific image and the manifest image could be brought into a fusion is for Sellars the same as the problem of whether man will stay in charge of his self-productive powers, of his ability to reproduce himself as a reflective and responsible creature by producing a view of himself and the world. In considering the origin of the distinction between categories applying exclusively to man himself as a rational being and categories applying to the world only, Sellars seems to come close to the Fichtean idea of a self-creation (Selbstsetzung) of man. At the time when man—or perhaps one should say speechless Homo sapiens—was just behaving without having a categorical framework to describe and explain his behavior, he did not really exist as man. By producing the category of man and the terminology about inner states, man brought himself with “a jump” into being, according to Sellars. He writes:
The manifest image of man-in-the world ... is ... the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world. It is the framework in terms of which ... man first encountered himself—which is, of course, when he came to be man. I have given this quasi-historical dimension of our construct pride of place, because I want to highlight from the beginning what might be called the paradox of man’s encounter with himself, the paradox consisting in the fact that man couldn’t be man until he encountered himself.... The conclusion is difficult to avoid that the transition from pre-conceptual patterns of behaviour to conceptual thinking was a ... jump to a level of awareness which is irreducibly new, a jump which was the coming into being of man. (1963, 6)
Fichte was not talking of a jump but of a fundamental action (Tathandlung ). But his idea seems very similar to what Sellars says. The problem we are confronted with here is one to be found throughout the philosophy of German idealism from Fichte to Hegel. All philosophers of this “school” try to give an account of how some very fundamental human capacity is possible. In giving their account they use a “genetic” terminology, which gives a nondeterministic picture of x evolving or becoming or changing and thereby bringing to light y and z. For example, in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, human beings bring about free man by a primordial Tathandlung, and nature gives rise to consciousness by an “evolution.” In Schelling’s System des transzendentalen Idealismus, consciousness develops into self-consciousness. And understanding develops into reason und absolute knowledge in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes. Each says these genetic accounts are not meant to be descriptions of processes in time, but transcendental deductions or dialectical developments of concepts. But deduction does not necessarily mean logical inference as we commonly understand it. So the reader is left with some kind of formal, but not logically formal, genesis, a philosophical history of some important human capacities that may not relate to the real history of man. In Hegel this process can perhaps be interpreted as an idealized educational development, comparable to what Bachelard might have imagined when he wrote his theory of the development of the scientific mentality. But it is very hard to understand what stands behind these types of genesis and whether they are to be distinguished from mere imaginations, because references to historical sources are not relevant here. In Kant the term transcendental deduction can be interpreted in a legal sense. In Fichte, I believe, this is not possible. It seems to me that both Husserl and Sellars try something similar to these formalized types of genesis and therefore are of comparable obscurity in their philosophical histories.
The realms of scientific and nonscientific knowledge are related to each other in two ways: by a diachronic link and a synchronic one. In a diachronic link, the life-world stands historically at the beginning of all scientific developments, but this link can conflict synchronically with scientific opinions. For instance, if one looks at an object and believes that it does have color in the life-world, but physics tells us that these objects do not in fact have color, then we have a synchronic conflict between our experience and the supposedly resulting scientific theory.
In Husserl, the realm of Galilean science is historically later than life-world experience, and in Sellars the original image and the manifest image are historically earlier than the scientific image. For both, the life-world is systematically and historically the source of all meanings that the naturalistic sciences are unable to produce for themselves. Therefore for Husserl the life-world has a systematic and historical priority over any scientific theory or worldview. For Sellars the manifest image develops out of what he calls the original image by a “categorical differentiation,” and the scientific image develops out of the manifest image. Sellars puts the priority of the manifest image above the scientific image, and this priority is both systematic and historical: The scientific image is to be reconstructed against the background of the manifest image, and it is a historical product of a particular development of the manifest image. The original image was a myth. In it no distinction is made between intentions and actions on the one hand, and causes and effects on the other. It is, in the strict sense, not an image of man in the world, because man—as we saw in the passage quoted earlier—does not exist for himself in this image. Here man has no category for his intentional and reflective being, especially not for his rule-following capacity to explain something in a “conceptual scheme.”
The manifest image alters this by introducing theoretical and practical terms, or terms for “things” on the one hand, and for “personal categories” on the other: Everything that is to be explained by the inner states of a person belongs to a different categorical framework than what happens independently from personal states. According to Sellars, the invention of the manifest image is the invention of man as an independent reflective and practical being, who can follow rules of reasoning and produce justifications for actions. The scientific image, as the latest developmental state in Sellars’s genealogy of images of man in the world, wipes out this distinction between personal states and natural events and tries to understand human affairs as special cases of the concatenations of natural causes and effects. So in a sense, the scientific image leads back to the original image, in which the difference between man and the world did not exist as a categorical one. The homogeneity of the scientific image seems to be for Sellars the preliminary prize for the enormous explanatory success of the natural sciences, a success not to be found in the original image, which was the reason for its historical instability. The instability of the constellation between the manifest image and scientific image that Sellars is diagnosing comes not from explanatory failures but from the incompatibility of these two conceptual frameworks.
Synchronically, the two realms are connected with each other by man, or in Husserl’s terms, through “the European form of man” (das europäische Menschentum). Human beings as scientists do not change their worlds or their consciousness when they leave the breakfast table and walk into their laboratories. They have to bring together, somehow, what they believe as scientists and what they believe as wives and husbands at the breakfast table. It is both the supposed unity of consciousness and the supposed fundamental self-givenness of a transcendental ego in Husserl, and the supposed unity of our language in Sellars, that force us to search for a connection between facts and values, the scientific worldview and the life-world or the manifest image. The idea that human beings might think in compartments or play different language-games and might not care very much how the compartments and language-games hang together are not options for Sellars or Husserl, but relativistic nightmares. To opt for such a relativism would be considered in their individual frameworks as opting out of European rationality. Both connections—I will call them the historical and the anthropological one—have their complications.
Before I discuss these complications, I should point out that it is very difficult to understand in what sense these realms, looked at separately, are unified entities and what the possible criteria for their identity could be. As can be seen in the first quote from Sellars, he thinks that the sciences aim at unity, but that they do not yet have this unity. Unity of the sciences is considered by Sellars to be a historical goal. If one considers the sciences as systems of theories, the unity of scientific knowledge would be, in a weak sense, the compatibility of scientific theories. In a strong sense, the unity of the sciences would consist in the reformulation of all scientific knowledge into one language, their integration into one grand theory.
However, the sciences consist not just of theories but also of technologies and practices, which transport know-how, in other words non-propositional knowledge. In the actual historical process, one does not only see a multiplication of scientific terminologies but also of technologies and scientific practices. For Husserl the technologies and practices of the sciences are opaque knowledge. Even the use of mathematical shortcuts in physics or engineering is for him unscientific, in that they impart no knowledge in the sense of Aristotelian episteme.
The phenomenological search for transparency is to be interpreted, it seems to me, as the infinite project of making explicit everything in our knowledge, so that we have at least a theoretical possibility of understanding any technology and conceptual or mathematical shortcut by looking at the historical reconstruction of its origin. But the growing body of tacit knowledge in the sciences arising from the differentiation of practices and technologies makes it difficult to see in what sense there can be a hidden tendency for unity behind the development of the sciences as Husserl and Sellars seem to believe. Furthermore, if one distinguishes between propositional and non-propositional knowledge, one has to observe that the nonscientific realms of knowledge contain much more non-propositional, or implicit and tacit, knowledge than explicit knowledge. What would the unity of a realm of practices in a life-world or in the manifest image be? It cannot be the unity of a coherent theory, that is, the unity of a set of propositions, because the tacit knowledge and the practices of the life-world, or the manifest image, are never given to us in a theory. If there is an expression or description of this tacit knowledge at all, it can, for example, be found in social history about certain epochs and in novels.
I see no theoretical criteria for the unity of these non-propositional knowledge-structures in Husserl or Sellars. Using this background, is it possible to imagine a unity of the knowledge that is implicit in practices like rowing, dancing, writing, and singing with the practices followed in laboratories like reading an X-ray picture or a smear or cutting a piece of mouse brain with a microtome? Husserl’s “form of life,” or the “comprehensive style” (Gesamtstil ) of seeing the world, and Sellars’s “image” both seem to suggest that the beliefs and practices of the nonscientific realm come together into some kind of unification that is independent of the inferential structures of theories (Crisis, § 9b). What would be the principles of unity here, and how can we individuate a form of life, a style in which to see the world or a manifest image? I see no answers to these questions in Husserl and Sellars, and it is probably no accident that the terms style and image are rather vague names for the unities they are considering here.
Sellars says that the manifest image and the scientific image are “ideal types” for him in the sense of Max Weber (Sellars, 1963, 5). That statement throws some shadows on the idea that there was a historical development from the original image, then to the manifest, and finally to the scientific image. Can there be a historical development from one ideal type to another? Ideal types are comparable to epochal terms like Renaissance or modernity; they are systematizing terms. These terms are constructed in order to produce a simplifying structure in the hopelessly complex situations that are presented to historians by their historical sources. But considering things in this historical manner almost always relativizes such systematizations by revealing supposed continuities and particularities that do not fit into the system. Odo Marquard once pointed out this fact by saying that we live in the epoch of a deflation of epochal thresholds (Epochenschwellenabschwellungsepoche).
Husserl believes that the opacity of the sedimentation of knowledge can be made transparent again by a special kind of phenomenological historical research; research that will not use conceptual techniques but will reconstruct their origin. But this reconstructive work cannot be done without a historical technique. The historian of knowledge needs as many conceptual tools as any other researcher who has to organize his material. As soon as these conceptual tools of historical research are taken to be a reality, the researcher falls into the trap of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (as Whitehead had called it). It is a nonstatement, or a manifestation of this fallacy, to say that the Middle Ages developed into the Renaissance and the Renaissance into modernity. This is playing with one’s own systematizations, but it is not producing historical insights or explanations. Husserl and Sellars do not produce such nonstatements. But the tension between a historical approach to knowledge and a systematizing approach is as characteristic of the Husserl of the Crisis as it is for Sellars (1962) in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.”2
By considering that the historical task of philosophy is to unify the realms of the life-world and the manifest image on the one hand and the scientific worldview on the other hand, both philosophers take a peculiar methodological standpoint in the historiography of knowledge. The history of knowledge is guided for them by a goal and a source. For them, as for Bachelard, the role of the historian is not just the role of an observer. In their view, the historian of knowledge participates in the development of knowledge, not by producing a special kind of knowledge, but by knowing where all knowledge comes from and where it aims to go. The “teleological motor” in the history of knowledge may be different in different participating historical projects. It is the constantly differentiating plurality of the sciences that needs a plurality of epistemological investigations: those the historian must work out for himself in Bachelard and the required unity of reason and the sciences in Husserl and Sellars.
According to these views, the historian of knowledge has to push knowledge in the right direction by using his historical systematizations. Because of their understanding of the history of knowledge, Husserl and Sellars each have a clear vision of the origin of these worldviews and images, and they seem to possess strong convictions not only about the future unified state of the sciences but also about the future of knowledge as such.
Husserl believes that the primal establishment (Urstiftung) of the European form of man (europäisches Menschentum) is connected with the ideals of freedom and of science (Crisis, § 5). Science as a form of life could only develop where man becomes conscious of himself as a free being, who can produce his own way of living and is not forced to live in a certain way. Asking for reasons for everything and not believing in authorities is an essential feature of what Husserl believes to be the European style of living and of science. Because science and the life-world, with its personalistic view of free self-responsible man, grow from the same historical root, they must, Husserl seems to argue, be compatible and unifiable in some way and at some time. A fundamental origin and a final goal of the historical development go together for him: “But to every primal establishment (Urstiftung) essentially belongs a final establishment (Endstiftung) assigned as a task to the historical process” (Crisis, § 15). Sellars believes that both the manifest image and the scientific image have the same function: They try to explain what happens in the world and why persons behave the way they do behave. Because both images are “produced” for the same explanatory aims, it must be possible, so Sellars seems to argue, to fuse them into what he calls a “synoptic vision.” Thus an ultimate origin and a common function serve as promises that a unification of life-world or the manifest image and the scientific worldview is possible. This idea of a unification of scientific and nonscientific knowledge leads to very special philosophical projects.
Husserl tries to make the life-world transparent in a way that gives a basis for all human activities, and is constitutive for science, through his project of transcendental phenomenology. This phenomenology is, according to Husserl, the hidden aim at which the history of the European form of man is directed from the start. Sellars, however, wants to anticipate a process of metaphysics as the hidden aim of the sciences. A metaphysics that will dissolve the contrast between a person, as an entity with intentions and a life-history on the one hand, and a physical thing, as an opaque entity with more or less no history on the other. Processes have, or perhaps even are, histories, and they may have protentional and retentional phases that would make it possible to integrate human reflectivity with natural causality.
According to Sellars, it is this contrast between persons and things that at present keeps the scientific worldview and the manifest image apart. In a metaphysics of pure processes, as Sellars sketches it in his Carus Lectures (1981), histories of mental events will no longer be reconstructed as exotic entities that can only be explained in an ontology that takes the concept of a person as fundamental. Pure processes and their temporal structures are the elementary entities in the reconstruction of states of consciousness and also, Sellars thinks, the starting point of the reconstruction of any scientific object. The justification for such a speculation can be found, according to Sellars, mainly in the tendency of modern physics to take processes and fields to be more fundamental than enduring objects like atoms or substances. (Here Sellars seems to take the quantum field theory somehow as the most fundamental reductive basis of all physical theories.) The unification of knowledge will happen, for Sellars, from the standpoint of an ideal science, which revises our view of enduring individuals like persons and things in one move.
Husserl, on the other hand, takes a different approach to a unifying conception of reality or a universal knowledge. It is not the anticipation of a future fundamental scientific ontology but a philosophical analysis of the life-world and a historical phenomenology of the sciences that applies in his analysis. While Sellars produces a kind of heuristics for a possible integrated scientific view in the future, one that would not stand in opposition to the self-understanding of man as it is given now in the manifest image, Husserl believes that the analysis of the life-world will again bring to light the fundamental meanings that made science possible. Thus for him it is not heuristic metaphysics but the history of science that is the key project that will help us attain the transparency and unity of knowledge.
I would like to conclude with four critical remarks on these projects of Sellars and Husserl:
Even if the scientific image or the naturalistic worldview ceased to be challenged by argument, we would probably not alter these institutions. Certainly, science has an influence on families, schools, and law courts. But I dare say that the way we see and feel about human beings is more constantly determined by these institutions than by what the sciences say about man. What Husserl and Sellars have to say about the relevance of scientific knowledge and the life-world or the manifest image is much too simplistic if one takes these social institutions into account. It does not do justice to the complex way in which a culture forms a way of understanding and reacting to human beings through its institutions. It seems to me that the ideas of a life-world and a manifest image are even dangerous, in the sense that they give us the illusion that in philosophy we know how human beings come to understand themselves, without looking into the institutional, emotional, and cultural details of certain societies. In this sense, both notions could foster a kind of anthropological essentialism and fundamentalism that would be of little use for a historical epistemology that is interested in historical details.