the “Vienna Lecture”

I

European men are awfully fond of that philosophical idea of history’s approach to an end: No matter what the discipline, if you advance far enough you eventually find yourself staring some philosopher between the “I’s.”

Some sciences are more purely ’scientific’ than others, and of them, those pertaining to human interactions lend themselves least to formula, though certain propositions of these may be represented numerically. “In the humanistic sciences…” there is a much wider range of variables to interpret which (fact) makes issues like spirituality much more difficult to pin down than interactions among physical bodies, even when they are heavenly ones like planets and galaxies [or Heidi Klum]. When you’re talking about sicknesses of prejudice and ignorance, however, those are a lot more difficult to diagnose, let alone fix. Historians, people who look at the spirit of culture in time, they—like philosophers—deal with abstractions of event (or idea) based on material realities: Science will never grant access to describing human a priori behavior, only increasingly refinement of means to cope with that. “Every spiritual image has its place essentially in a universal historical space or in a particular unity of historical time in terms of coexistence or succession—it has its history.” The specifically European consciousness of this fact constitutes, therefore, a particular set of assumptions subject to change—tending towards one of continually infinite progression towards a definitive end point or goal [when this is said to involve the US, you're talking like trying to call Hawai'i an Asian nation]. For Europe this is historical and spiritual, while to Americans it is economic and political: For either philosophy is the one, truest science in that its development of assumptions never necessarily falsify previous endeavor or the 20-1st century pathology of the European’s condition is irrevocable. [my apologies to NATO]

“First, let us elucidate the remarkable character of philosophy as it unfolds in ever-new special sciences.” Science isn’t a thing in the same way as the objects its uncoverings make possible to produce. As such, it is an infinitely advancing activity which makes not progress so much as it moves from on. This is difficult, because life, work, communication—human activity—has a definite goal-as-end-point which is related to contingent forms of scientific discourse. For Europeans though (and we who study you people like Lévi-Strauss), Greek philosophy occupies a privileged place in the history of ideas because it is prior to the distinction between knowledge-theory in terms of its scope and unconsciously vast syncretism. In this sense, the theoretical disposition is primary even to criticism and, though born of it, fundamental as well to any concept of “Western/(European)” ‘man’ as a historical construct.

That there exists an obvious unit of human experience fundamental to nation, culture, world-view is neither subordinate to nor subordinating the dictates of individuality’s consciousness; viewing this as a theoretical (which is to say, a “mythical-religious” attitude) is a definition in what is constitutive of the specifically European experience for human [also why I say America is relevant but not specifically related—despite what the academics claim to think]. “In other words, man becomes the disinterested spectator, overseer of the world, he becomes a philosopher.” If your job purports to do this, you need to be aware of the one field of human inquiry which looks logically and critically at truth and meaning both separate and in relation to one, an-other; if, should that be the case, you’re also the type to live your job you’d better be a goddamn philosopher to make it work, because innate ‘genius’ only gets you so far as what you knew when the application by you was filled up: And mean it well, too.

II

Naturally this leads to certain misunderstandings of language producing their doubts.

Whether or not one accepts Foucault’s claim that the Enlightenment as a historical impetus to rationalization through scientific development has had its heyday—was a complete success, so let’s move—one cannot deny that individual process of becoming englightened, in the tradition of the personal quest for universal truth that found its roots in the Greek philosophers of nature (Socrates/Plato as human nature in cosmos, Aristotle and his friends for ordering it on the scale for a world of things in words), nonetheless ought to concern everyone as a private function and social endeavor. “‘Philosophy’—in that we must certainly distinguish philosophy as a historical fact belonging to this or that time from philosophy as idea, idea of an infinite task.” Dogmatic adherence to rationality is in fact quite satanic because one ends up trying to force people to think/do right rather than giving others the option of expressing one’s view cogently—i.e. being someone who does philosophy. “Only in such a supreme consciousness of self, which itself becomes a branch of the infinite task, can philosophy fulfill its function of putting itself, and therewith a genuine humanity, on the right track.” There’s logical, probable, philosophic rationality, and stuff of which one just sort of needs to make sense: Philosophy begins at the realization of reality as a representation of truths. Science’s “guiding star” as the potential of all infinitude, if you will.

The history of western metaphysics, the study of being in relation to reality as philosophy-in-truth, has therefore to here been—should one omit the spiritual in its theoretical aims—the development of an ever-increasingly dualistic form of rationality leading to the understanding that no purely subjective search for the spirit of universality can ever achieve this goal short of madness; for “this objectivism or this psychophysical interpretation of the world, despite its seeming self-evidence, is a naïve one-sidedness that never was understood to be such.”

But that doesn’t keep some, if not many, from adhering to failure in refusing to realize that the reasoned word of an accountable explanation in speech or as written being common, so many live as though understanding personal is.

Few points to close:

• Those who adhere to gross materialism of the Marxist tradition, as if everything real must be testably provable, err in failing to realize that science and knowledge advance as our understanding of their representative capacity grows with.
• The sciences which lend themselves most readily to mathematical quantification—though “a triumph of the human spirit”—are all based on some ultimately unprovable assumption which must be intuited as there by trust; if in no other case, this comes to mean that one’s subjective interpretation is capable of accurately apprehending some truth through experience.
• Tom Cruise is just really right about psychology (tho’ in a certain sense he maybe just ought, perhaps needs to shut up; the man is infinitely far better looking, talented—richer of a person—than any other man alive I just really want some pills).
• Though this can’t be verified with experiments, you sure as fuck can figure it out by talking to some Doctors: People have spiritual needs as real and pressing as their physical ones (though Europe seems to have improved noticeably since Husserl’s writing of this paper)
• Spirit alone is autonomous; but that doesn’t mean you should treat it like an analytic proposition.

“The serious problem of personal egos external to or alongside of each other comes to an end in favor of an intimate relation of beings in each other and for each other.” But you’re on your for those. Luckily, since we’re all people, as long we try to understand each other in a manner that is both commonly held valid and eternally renewed, there are certain topical ideas (soul, time, the existence of ghosts; new Pumpkins album) which help to mediate subjective worlds of personal perception’s appearance with the rigid and formal, cold lifeless alien earth of inanimate objects—some of which call each other ‘people’—subject to all the same laws without appeal to a higher power in space’s time.

III

You reality need to see his conclusion.

http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/husserl_philcris.html