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L'Origine de la géométrie d'Edmund Husserl à travers l'histoire et la philosophie des sciences

The Expressiveness of the Sciences and Their Crisis. A Rereading of the Origin of Geometry of Edmund Husserl

Pietro Pasquinucci
p. 95-112

Résumés

En comparant et en opposant la définition husserlienne du sens comme noyau d’identité et la définition merleau-pontienne du sens comme différence ou écart, le présent article vise à développer une réflexion originale sur le sens originel des sciences, sur la signification, les raisons et les solutions possibles de leur crise ; et enfin sur la relation entre la science et la philosophie. Tout d’abord, j’esquisserai deux conceptions possibles et assez opposées de l’expression et de la sédimentation du sens (sect. 1). À partir de ces résultats, une conception différente de la méditation historique et de la Rückfrage sera esquissée : la validité et l’authenticité des formations scientifiques seront montrées comme fondées non pas sur le sens originel, mais plutôt sur leur propre expressivité, c’est-à-dire sur le fait que toute opération scientifique est une déformation cohérente mais irréductible de sa propre tradition (sect. 2). Un sens particulier de la crise des sciences émergera de ces analyses : la crise sera définie non pas comme la perte du sens originel, mais plutôt comme la reproduction statique d’une essence identique. En conséquence, une description originale de la relation entre les sciences et la philosophie sera exposée dans la conclusion, permettant d’esquisser une réflexion sur le rôle que la philosophie peut jouer par rapport à la pensée scientifique et à sa crise (sect. 3).

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Texte intégral

1 The sense as reproducible identity and the sense as singular difference: on two different conceptions of expression

1The problem with the original sense of science and philosophy as addressed by Husserl in The Origin of Geometry [1939] involves the issue of how sense can be preserved and reproduced as identically the same [identische dieselbe]. The issue derives from the fact that the acts through which this sense is constituted and the experiments in which it is re-presented are changeable and temporal. Indeed, they possess the singularity and unrepeatable nature that are typical of historical and temporal events. From this standpoint, to understand the essence of philosophy and sciences as historical traditions we first have to question the status of sense and its particular reproducibility, which is the object of individual memory and public tradition.

  • 1 Unlike other thinkers [see e.g., Frege1892, 25], Husserl does not draw a sharp distinction (...)
  • 2 Still in The Origin of Geometry, Husserl states “The sensible expressions have a sp (...)

2Following the Logical Investigations [1975], Husserl conceived sense as a core of identity, which, even if always intertwined with the psychological act of the subject and with the space-temporality of the personal experience, is nonetheless separable and independent from these empirical conditions. In the ordinary communicative context, Husserl says, the meaning [Bedeutung] is always intertwined with the material words, with the object that they denote, and with the inner life of the speaker that they make public [kundgeben] [Husserl 1975, Engl. transl., vol. I, Investigation I, § 7]. Nonetheless, in our inner and silent life, we can recognize the meaning of a proposition without uttering a word [Husserl 1975, Engl. transl., vol. I, Investigation I, § 8]. The meaning is thus the thematic core of sense1 that we can experience in pure evidence in our private lives, and which the words we utter are supposed to express [ausdrücken], by externalizing and embodying it in language. In this way, Husserl isolates the realm of the ideal objects and also already tacitly inaugurates the field of immanence. In this field, experience can be grasped in its essential sense without the factuality and historicity of languages making ambiguous that which presented itself as apodictically evident and with a univocal and recognizable meaning in the eidetically reduced experience. From this moment on, all “external facts” and “bodily events”2 will have a meaning or sense that is irreducible to them, an essence that they merely embody, externalize, or explicate but which they can never be fully identified with.

3From the outset, Merleau-Ponty rejects the separability of the ideal meaning from the corporeality of the signs. He follows Saussure’s lead by defining meaning as a diacritical gap between words:

Signs do not signify anything: rather than expressing a sense, they indicate a gap of sense between themselves and other signs. [Merleau-Ponty 1960, chap. 1]

4All direct sense finds its authentic expressive power in an “indirect language”, which only possesses meaning because of the lateral, historical, carnal relationship between sign and sign, sound and sound. Hence, this reverses Husserl’s fundamental statement, “language says peremptorily when it renounces saying the thing itself” [Merleau-Ponty 1960, chap. I] or, in other terms, when it renounces being a mere externalization and incarnation of an inner sense and becomes a metamorphosis of experience, its extension, and reconfiguration.

  • 3 In the Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis [1966], Husserl states that an intenti (...)
  • 4 This conception is expressed by the concept of “body schema”. For an exhaustive analysis of (...)
  • 5 On the different conception of “passivity” which is implied by this reflection, see [Beith (...)

5This different definition of the linguistic meaning is connected to a different conception of the perceptual experience [Merleau-Ponty 2011]. Perception is primarily defined by Merleau-Ponty as pre-intentional sensitivity, in which there are no intended objects, nor “impressions” [Impressionen] and just sensations. Husserl’s concept of “original impression” [Urimpression] can be understood as a sort of minimal unity that is immanent to the conscious experience.3 Even if this is not thematized as such, it is associatively unified with other impressions to form an intentional object. On the contrary, a sensation cannot be synthesized with other sensations because it is an overall restructuration of the global operative organization of the body4 and its set of practices, habits, abilities and particular ways of apprehending the world [Merleau-Ponty 2015, 193].5 Therefore, when the act of perception is actually occurring, it is a “certain posture” of corporeality or an unconscious transformation of the body schema rather than an impression. It is “an original past, a past that has never been present” to a consciousness [Merleau-Ponty 1945, 252].

  • 6 For the criticisms addressed by Merleau-Ponty about this conception, see [2015, 231 (...)

6The recognition of this “immemorial past” overturns Husserl’s conception of sedimentation. According to Husserl, consciousness is a flow of experiences that arises from an original impression. This impression flows immediately into the future as protentional intention and is held back through “retention” [Husserl 1966, 2013].6 Accordingly, every experience has necessarily been present. Even if an experience gradually sinks into oblivion it can always be awakened through an act of remembering that moves from the present and represents the same sense as already experienced.

  • 7 A similar conception of sedimentation is also delineated by Desanti and Cavaillès, (...)

7Merleau-Ponty refuses this image of sedimentation as a progressive accumulation of conscious experiences. Instead he considers that sedimentation is accomplished through the inscription of the event in the sensible body, an occurrence that informs it and determines its singular style of existence. In this way, sense is paradoxically preserved and then lived and experienced rather than first being originally lived and secondly preserved. It lives within the intentional act, and not in front of it; it sparks the intentional consciousness without being reactivable and retrievable as such [see Terzi 2016, 2017]. Therefore, while for Husserl each expression is always the expression of an original evidence, for Merleau-Ponty each piece of evidence is the evidence of something expressed. Givenness always presupposes a movement of expression that sinks its roots into an immemorial past.7 The past that we can retrieve is the effect of a retrograde movement by which the words institute the meaning of which they are supposed to be a mere incarnation: “the pre-existence of the true to the utterance is based on writing and language [...]. As an expressed sense it is (even for me who expresses it) other than before. Expression is not solely a means of transmission, it alters the Erzeugung” [Merleau-Ponty 1998, 29]. Language can no longer be intended to be the incarnation and exteriorization of an originally disincarnated and inner meaning. On the contrary, it is the very precondition of the disembodiment and interiority of sense.

8Because of this different conception of sedimentation and expression, sense obtains the same singularity and unrepeatability that pertains to its empirical conditions. This is because it not only emerges always anew from them—which is also true for Husserl—but also always emerges from them differently, having been sparked by the singularity of the event and its inscription in an individual body. We must pay attention, since also in this perspective sense is not reducible to its empirical conditions—it is not the uttered proposition, it is not the personal judgment, and it is not the material sign. Rather, it is the significance that all these temporal events generate; the gap that they indicate. When sense is conceived as a core of meaning, it can always be isolated from the sign. On the contrary, when it is thought of as a diacritical gap “any effort to close our hand on the thought that inhabits words leaves us with only a piece of verbal matter between our fingers” [Merleau-Ponty 1960, 110]. Sense is neither independent from its conditions nor identifiable with one of them which means it is nothing but the significance of this singularity or what each singular encounter between the world and the body indicates as something to be said, something to be seen.

2 From the Rückfrage to the retrograde movement of truth: the retrospective foundation of the science

9Despite all the evolutions and revolutions that Husserl’s thought underwent over a period of many years, sense and the meaning still have these characteristics in the Crisis of European Science [1976a] and The Origin of Geometry. Those analyses are presented as research into the identical and invariant sense [identisch dieselbe] of science and philosophy [Husserl 1939, 206]. The original sense of these traditions is presented as lying beyond their historical manifestations, maintaining the same independence of meaning from its empirical conditions as discussed above. Furthermore, even in these texts, the sedimentation is intended to be the preservation of what has originally been present to a consciousness. The sense of the first geometric formation must (according to an eidetic necessity) have been given with evidence in the consciousness of the first geometer as an immanent content, and can only be reactivated for this reason [Husserl 1939, 210].

  • 8 Then, as Alloa states, Husserl’s reflection on history is sparked by its fundamental intuit (...)
  • 9 Therefore, even if Husserl recognizes that “writing precedes the establishment of geometry” (...)

10Just as in the Logical Investigations, moreover, the expressive activity of the first geometer is still conceived as a movement of embodiment and exteriorization, and the problem of the original sense of geometry becomes that of understanding “how does this inner formation, which was constituted in the psychic, inner dimension, become a peculiar intersubjective being, an ideal object which, precisely insofar as it is geometric, is not at all something psychically real” [Husserl 1939, 210]. A private and unrepeatable sense only becomes repeatable and reproducible by embodying itself in a language, making itself independent from the actual implementation of the acts in which it was first realized,8 and from those in which it will be realized again.9 According to Husserl, a person who speaks exteriorizes the sense which he or she lived in an original fashion by incarnating it in a proposition. Conversely, the listener can reactivate that same sense by starting from the words, intending what they mean to say. The words are thus the medium of a pure meaning, which is lived in the first person by the speaker and can also be understood by the listener, insofar as it is Sinn der Rede, the sense of speech. It is precisely as Sinn der Rede, Husserl says, that ideality appears in history, without being reducible to the historical formations.

11On the contrary, according to Merleau-Ponty, communication is accomplished through the transformation and reconfiguration of the language system of the listener [Merleau-Ponty 1988, chap. 1]. Long before ordinary communication there is a “conquering use of language” [Merleau-Ponty 1960, chap. 1–2] which originally re-creates an already lived sense by using the word as a bodily gesture rather than incarnating or reproducing it. The diacritical status of sensations implies a conception of communication that is grounded in the flesh of the words and the significance of the different ways in which the material signs transform and inform the body schema rather that in the incarnation of the meaning.

12Therefore, authentic communication implies the creation of a new meaning that emerges from a restructuration of the linguistic schema of the listener. In ordinary language each word seems to possess an identical and univocal meaning which has only to be understood but conversely in the creative use of language, we might say, each pronounced word has a different meaning because it can only signify something by being restructured through the singular experience of the bodily subject.

  • 10 In this direction, Carlo Sini states that “the historical crisis of the occidental (...)
  • 11 For example, in Experience and Judgment, Husserl states that when, in the moment of the Erf (...)

13The heir of a tradition can question the actual formation of science precisely in the same way the hearer understands the meaning of the words10 and in the same way we can examine the consequences of these different conceptions of communication at the level of historical tradition. After all, it would not be correct to affirm that Husserl conceives of the historical reactivation of sense as a mere reproduction without creation, repetition without novelty: the authentic Nachstiftung implies a re-creation or a second creation of sense. Each step of a tradition develops and modifies the original sense, bringing it to a wider degree of clarity. In both memory and tradition, sense can modify itself along the series of reactivations and reproductions: in the moment of the present Erfüllung, an object that presents itself as being the same as seen yesterday can modify its sense without ceasing to be the same. For example, yesterday I thought I saw a man in the window, today I realized that it is—and indeed—was a mannequin.11 This kind of retrograde movement of the discovery of the truth is also present in the historical tradition, in the moment of Nachstiftung, and makes the identity of sense possible in its historical development. For example, the non-Euclidean geometries do not refuse Euclidean geometry as being false but instead retrospectively modify its sense, by rendering it a mere case of a wider concept of geometry.

  • 12 As Cavaillès acknowledges: “One of the problems with the doctrine of science is pre (...)
  • 13 In this sense, it seems to me that what Deleuze says about platonic idealism may be valid a (...)
  • 14 Desanti shows the contradiction implicit in this “heroic” but “unsatisfactory” atte (...)

14Nonetheless, Husserl describes this development as an explication of the implicit, as the progressive manifestation of what was already implied in the first creation. He cannot conceive of it as a concrete transformation of sense, as an irreducible metamorphosis.12 In this case, he would lose the unit of measurement or original essence with which it is possible to distinguish the authentic copies from the simulacra, the moment of crisis and betrayal of sense from that of productive development and transmission of it, the worthy heir of the tradition from the unworthy one.13 Hence, the fundamental law [fundamentales Gesetz] of historical meditation: if the truth is grounded—that is, if it explicates the original sense of the tradition as its worthy heir—then we can always go back, moving from it to the original evidence on which it is founded [Husserl 1939, 215]. Rediscovering the original sense means distinguishing grounded truths from groundless ones and separating coherent developments of the original sense from their untrue counterparts. For the Rückfrage to be possible, each step of the historical development of science must have been accomplished in full evidence and must be a coherent development of the original sense. In this way, however, the Rückfrage presupposes the coherence and original essence that it intends to investigate:14 if the historical development of science were not coherent, it would be impossible to investigate it backwards. Husserl reconstructs the past for it to be the coherent premise of the sense of the present that he chose:

Superimposing the origin of consciousness on a pseudo-temporal beginning is an entirely arbitrary operation since this beginning is such only under what follows it. [Cavaillès 1987, 76]

15The problem of illegitimacy is not resolved, since, if empirical history serves to reveal essential concatenations, this occurs in the opposite sense, through the “myth of the return to the past” [Cavaillès 1987, 75–76] rather than as forward movement. Therefore, Husserl’s conception is thought to be nothing but “the naively resumed doubling of the experience of consciousness” and its most illusional effect is to make us believe that “in all productions of demonstrative chaining, each moment is, so to speak, generated by the preceding one in a continuous movement, produced once and for all and indefinitely reproducible” [Desanti 1968, 131–132].

16To avoid this aporetic conclusion, Husserl is forced to dislocate the essence and stretch it along the whole historical course, making it coincide with a beginning that already had in itself its implicit final development hidden within and with an end that illuminates the path of scientific development, although it may be unattainable. The stretched and torn authentic sense of the sciences never inhabits the present of the actual scientist, who is always inadequate and insufficient:

Die oben angegebene “Voraussetzung” ist in der Tat nie erfüllt worden. [Husserl 1939, 217]

17Thus, the sciences are in a perpetual crisis, for their authentic meaning never fully inhabits their present, the present in which they are practiced and concretely deployed, the present of their words, their texts, and their gestures. Sense is always elsewhere and forever lost.

18On the contrary, according to Merleau-Ponty’s account of communication, sense is always in the here and now of an authentically expressive operation that does not dominate itself and its origin, and that for this very reason is living and functioning: “penser n’est pas avoir, mais n’avoir pas” [Merleau-Ponty 1998, 30]. Husserl’s aim of “taking possession of the sense of philosophy” [1939, 205] is deconstructed from the ground up:

Stiftung is not enveloping thinking, but open thinking, [...] not position of an end, but position of a style, not frontal grasp, but lateral deviation. [Merleau-Ponty 1998, 31]

  • 15 The figure of the triangle is “a certain modality of my hold on the world” [Merleau-Ponty 1 (...)

19The Nachstiftung is not the explanation of the original sense in a new aspect that was implicit in the beginning, but rather an irreducible metamorphosis, a radical novelty. Like sensible words or the perceptual object, the scientific formation can only have a meaning—can be more than a mere Körper, can be Sprachleib—by inscribing itself in a sentient body by being always recreated anew through its singular and unrepeatable style of existence.15 This kind of transformative movement is always at stake in the reactivation of a scientific ideality. A scientific object is sedimented in the written demonstrations of a science or its formulae and can only be “reactivated” through the materiality of signs. This is based on the differential relationship that the signs institute between what is already said and what presents itself, in this very occurrence, as yet to be said. The intentional core is, therefore, nothing but a “void moment in which the object presents itself as an already which is not yet” [Desanti 1968, 93], the surface effect of a circular relationship in which the domain of stratification determines a domain of possibilities, while being determined by it as its point of departure [see Desanti 1968, 125]. Every stable surface of scientific meanings is silently inhabited and animated by this transformative circularity; by a creative gesture that, to be effective, requires precisely that singularity of sign and sense that Husserl wants to eradicate at all costs from his conception of ideality.

  • 16 Through this reflection, Merleau-Ponty rethinks Bergson’s concept of “retrograde movement o (...)

20The particular sense that the past assumes in the light of the present is no longer a wider grade of its clarity, but a transformation of it, an authentic reconfiguration. However, even if the past only retrospectively assumes its sense, the present act of this retrospection derives from the past event, which is inscribed within it through the affection of the sensible body by the material formations. Therefore, the Rückfrage does not imply a retrospective illusion, nor a simple retrograde movement of the discovery of truth. Instead it is an authentic retrograde movement of the truth itself, in which the past event retrospectively assumes one of its possible senses by actualizing itself in a new configuration [Merleau-Ponty 2015, 219–220].16 We must take seriously “this banality that we could not read Archimedes before the discovery of infinitesimal calculus, as we read him after that discovery”, surrendering to the historicity of our point of view, but also exercising the rights that this historicity grants us [Desanti 1968, 10]. We can still interrogate the history of science to find the meaning of our scientific practice but we can no longer aspire to discover in it a unique and univocal sense, something invariant beyond or below all variations; a model of geometry beyond all its empirical and paradigmatic examples.

21The effect of contrast is what lives in the deepness of the past, a “spectrum of ideality” [Desanti 1968, 113] that follows from the actual operations and is always again restructured by them, rather than the essential sense. This is the meaning of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “shadow”, as analyzed in the famous essay on The Philosopher and his shadow, dedicated to Husserl’s Ideas II. Like the original sense of geometry, the shadow of Husserl’s thought, the unsaid or unthought of its philosophy, is not an implicit sense which has to be developed. It is that precise and singular meaning which it obtains through the encounter with Merleau-Ponty’s reflection [Merleau-Ponty 1960, chap. VI]. There is here a history of contact which emerges by contrast from the encounter of the past event with the present meditation on it. Thus, the past of the first foundation is “mythical” [Merleau-Ponty 1964, Engl. transl. 243]: it is a narration of the origin which starts from the present, the retrospective institution of the founder, the a posteriori generation of the original essence: the eidos is “flesh, which has become essence”. Like all myths, this past is called to legitimate the present, receiving its sense from this same claim of legitimacy. The present of Nachstiftung determines its past and establishes its origins while generating the unit of measurement of its validity.

  • 17 For a comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s thoughts on these themes, se (...)

22The error of Husserl in this sense would be the hope for an identical sense, for a univocal origin, which can legitimate the task, method, and duty of the scientist. The relation between eidos and fact, between the universal idea of science and its historical variations is grounded on the demand for authenticity which comes from the singularity, the difference and the irreducible novelty of the present: here is the particular resurface of the simulacra which Merleau-Ponty has accomplished, his peculiar reversal of Platonism [Deleuze 1969, Appendix I].17

3 The crisis of the sciences as inexpressiveness

23For both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, tradition is “oblivion of the origins”. However, while for Husserl oblivion is an undesired consequence of sedimentation, for Merleau-Ponty it has a noble form and can be generative and productive. For sense to be living and productive, we must not frontally recognize the original evidence that grounds it. Instead we must let it inscribe in us and find through us a new life. Tradition lives by transforming rather than preserving sense and lives in generative forgetfulness rather than in the explicit memory [Merleau-Ponty 1960, 55]. According to this thinking, the crisis of sense is due to the excess of memory and the disembodiment of sense and not to the loss of the origin and its embodiment in language. Sense is not in crisis because it is forgotten, but because it is too well memorized to be, here and now, still original.

  • 18 On the ontological value which the concept of expression has in Merleau-Ponty’s lat (...)

24Thus, the sense of the concept of “origin” radically changes. The original is neither something lost to be rediscovered nor something secretly preserved in the actual formations: original means authentically creative and expressive.18 Cavaillès seems to outline a similar conception of “originality” by intending “scientific demonstration” to mean an operation that grounds its own validity:

the apodictic assurance of beginning has disappeared: one must rely on the canonical procedure and its indefinite iteration. Thus, deductive concatenation is itself the creator of the contents it reaches: it is an illusion to be able to muster a few privileged utterances from the beginning [...]. The only reality initially posited, and on which the unity of the system rests, is the operation, or the system of operations, which is responsible for introducing both the statement and the rules [...]. [When] it becomes infinite, iteration and complications make the results uncontrollable [...], an unforeseeable expansion that reveals itself as such only when things are done. [Cavaillès 1987, 73]

25Originality lives in the same movement through which scientists renew and transform their tradition, giving its whole history a new sense. The authenticity of the actual meaning and legitimacy of its claim of validity is not founded on the original evidence but on its expressiveness. But, concretely, what does it mean? Being expressive firstly means freeing ourselves from the domain of the pure disembodied meaning in and through which the sense can be statically intended as identical, reproduced in its sameness. In this statement, we find the reinterpretation of a claim made by Husserl himself: when language is separated by experience it may lead to the static repetition of words whose meaning is no longer clear [Husserl 1939, 213]. For Husserl, the reason for this lies in language’s materiality, historicity and contingency, because of which it cannot transmit the sense without betraying it. On the contrary, according to Merleau-Ponty, this static repetition of meaningless words is due to language’s power of abstraction and identification, or, in other terms, its capacity to isolate meaning from its material conditions by distinguishing the essence of science from its factual developments. It is precisely the static reproducibility of the ideal object instituted by language that can lead to crisis.

  • 19 For an analysis of Husserl’s reflection on the ante-predicative, in its foundational relati (...)

26In both cases, language possesses the ambiguous status of a moment in which sense can be transmitted and betrayed, but for the quite opposite reason. Therefore, while for Husserl, as the medium of pure meaning, language necessarily implies betrayal, for Merleau-Ponty it can also be productive and creative: when it maintains its expressive and transformative connection with experience, language produces the proliferation of sense rather than crisis. In this creative usage, language is not the incarnation of a meaning that has already the features of linguistic ideality. Instead it is an expression of nature itself. Being expressive means freeing ourselves from this linguistic circle because traps us “in the garden of the said things” [Merleau-Ponty 1996, 359], in the domain of the pure essence, of the noble origin, of the worthy heritage.19 For example, with the transition to non-Euclidean geometry, the sense of Euclidean geometry finds itself integrated into a broader theory through a retrospective transformation of its sense. However, this retrograde movement is only possible because Euclidean geometry was not a simple explication of the essential and invariant sense of spatiality either. There is no longer any need for a pre-geometric foundation of geometry which would ground it on the ultimate evidence of “transcendental aesthetics” [Husserl 1974b, (I), § 89]. Thus, Euclidean geometry is not, as Husserl would have it, the carnal and material formulation of apodictic evidence that the successive geometric formations—such as the non-Euclidean geometries—are called upon to explicate further. Instead, it was the “effect of a choice” [Riemann 2016, 47] that highlighted only one of the possible senses of spatiality, a sense that will be not merely explicated, but transformed by the future geometrics’ developments.

27The necessity of each geometric gesture is inseparable from the contingency of its occurrence [see Cavaillès 1981, 60–80]. Even in an axiomatic-deductive science, each ideal object or postulate, each statement or axiom only appears necessary in the light of the domain it opens and grounds, that is, from the point of view of the future developments that it makes possible. In its actual development, it is always arbitrary to a certain extent [see Desanti 1968, 222]. In this novelty which transforms retrospectively the entire tradition resides the exit from a crisis that does not derive from the emergence of the simulacrum, but precisely from the imitation of the model, the repetition of an identical essence which is nothing but the reflex of the present cultural—or even political—power. Therefore, what Desanti’s statement about mathematics is also valid for geometry:

Mathematics itself produces its soil, and there is no other soil for it than that which it has ceaselessly produced and reproduced. [...] There is no point in investigating the soil of mathematics to discover the secret, mute original subsoil on which it is said to have sprung. [...] By traversing the mathematical universe, by following in it the indications of referral that it contains, by striving to reanimate the most distant regions [...] we will never come face to face with the event of the radical origin: here, too, birth is unspeakable: it shows itself only in its product and from within. [Desanti 1968, 283]

28In the above discussion we can already catch a glimpse of the new, different role that philosophy could play in its struggle against the crisis of the sciences. Philosophy must not free science from the oblivion of its essence, but rather, on the contrary, from the latent faith in the univocal sense of its meanings and idealities. Thanks to the historical inscription of their tradition in the carnal and concrete standpoints of scientists, the sciences are already faithful to their method and canons and can indefinitely repeat their inaugural gesture differently. It is just necessary for the sciences to always be emancipated each time by the illusion of being or having to be a simple development of their own premises.

We are not trying to show that mathematical thought rests upon the sensible but that it is creative. [Merleau-Ponty 1969, Engl. transl., 126]

  • 20 This is the relationship between epistemology and science as outlined by Desanti: “At the v (...)
  • 21 This is perhaps the point of the criticism that Cavaillès addresses to Husserl, by stating (...)

29Like every operation of the spirit, science finds its motivation in the flesh of an individual body that recapitulates the entire tradition to which it makes itself the worthy heir. In this self-regulation of a becoming, which is also the concrete becoming of legality, the role of philosophy can only consist in unveiling the creative depth of science, which always animates the surface of its already given meanings: philosophy must not ground science—it observes and describes its movement of self-foundation.20 Philosophy can play a role in saving the sciences from their crisis precisely by showing the perpetual transformation of the field which is always implied by the apparent static domain of axioms, demonstrations, deductions, operations, and ideal objects of science. A glimpse of this different kind of crisis can be caught in the reduction of science to a mere instrument of technical development. Technological progress is defined as a final task of science and thought in general and superimposes an external criterion on science that is only apparently adherent to its original essence. The crisis is caused precisely by the static reproduction of meanings that, used as technical tools, allow the world to be dominated more effectively. Therefore, technique runs the risk of imposing a criterion of “functionality” on science that only belongs to it in a marginal sense—selecting theories that conform to its model “après coup”; cutting the divergent series and reconstructing the image of science as a calm progress devoid of worrying concerns and fractures.21

  • 22 Nature is “self-production of sense”, says Merleau-Ponty in the course on the conce (...)
  • 23 In this conception, we can find the paradoxical unity of the three different senses that Ga (...)

30By playing this role, philosophy overcomes the distinction between fact and essence, causing the implosion of the space which Derrida considered the proper place of Husserlian phenomenology. The real challenge of Merleau-Pontyan thought consists of rediscovering the unity of these opposites and tracing a “wild history” through it that is a proliferation of meanings. This essentially coincides with the generating power of nature itself;22 a nature of which science is one of the possible expressions23 and which is not a mere sequence of facts or a historical development of essence. Beyond a development that shuns the divergent, and far from pure creativity without history, the authenticity of each scientific attempt lies in their being a coherent but irreducible metamorphosis of a tradition, a “fruitful oblivion or operative negation” [Merleau-Ponty 1998, 29]. To rediscover the authentic sense of scientific habit, rather than striving to find a stable and identical essence, we should let this creativity of nature express itself through us, through our singular and unrepeatable style: always again, always differently.

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Notes

1 Unlike other thinkers [see e.g., Frege1892, 25], Husserl does not draw a sharp distinction between “sense” [Sinn] and “meaning” [Bedeutung]. He uses the former term for the non-linguistic intentionality and the latter for the linguistic one [cf. Husserl 1976b, § 124]).

2 Still in The Origin of Geometry, Husserl states “The sensible expressions have a spatial-temporal individuation in the world like all corporeal events, [...] but this is not true of the spiritual form itself, which is called here ideal objectuality [ideale Gegenständlichkeit]” [Husserl 1939, 268].

3 In the Analyses Concerning Passive Synthesis [1966], Husserl states that an intentional and explicitly thematized object “can only be constituted when an immanent content is constituted as substratum” [Husserl 1966, 54]. See also [Husserl 2013].

4 This conception is expressed by the concept of “body schema”. For an exhaustive analysis of this fundamental concept [see Saint-Aubert 2013].

5 On the different conception of “passivity” which is implied by this reflection, see [Beith 2018], [Kaushik 2020].

6 For the criticisms addressed by Merleau-Ponty about this conception, see [2015, 231].

7 A similar conception of sedimentation is also delineated by Desanti and Cavaillès, who apply it precisely to a different image of scientific progress [Desanti 1968, 111], [Cavaillès 1987, 78]. It is exactly this different conception that will lead Desanti to affirm the need to “call into question the privilege of consciousness, or at least to dissociate its fate from the epistemology of the demonstrative sciences” [Desanti 1968, 229–223, my translation]. Similarly to Merleau-Ponty, Desanti states that “evidence is a local property of the field and, as such, is never other than a product”. If the theory of evidence still retains any meaning, it must designate the “knowledge of how characters and degrees of evidence are produced”. It is then possible to maintain the phenomenological approach: but phenomenological analyses can “no longer have any foundational character” [Desanti 1968, 230, n. 2] (all translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated). See also [Desanti 1963].

8 Then, as Alloa states, Husserl’s reflection on history is sparked by its fundamental intuitionism, which would require the ideal objectuality always to be actuated anew by an act of intuition: language and documents free ideality from the domain of the actual intuition [Alloa 2014, 230].

9 Therefore, even if Husserl recognizes that “writing precedes the establishment of geometry” [Alloa 2014, 232] and its ideality, it does not precede the ideal sense of which the objective ideality is, so to say, the stabilization. On the contrary, it is its secondary incarnation and its exterior and contingent explication. Language is the medium between the evident sense experienced in first person, and its stabilization as objective ideality, and it is not the authentic creation of that meaning.

10 In this direction, Carlo Sini states that “the historical crisis of the occidental tradition is then interpreted as the loss and fall of original intentionality. Science has operated precisely as the one who understands sounds, but not the signifying words” [Sini 1978, 548].

11 For example, in Experience and Judgment, Husserl states that when, in the moment of the Erfüllung, the previous intention is negated, the actual fulfillment “re-acts on the entire previous series [rückwirkend in der ganzen bisherigen Reihe]”. The perceptual sense does not only change in the new traits but rather “the noematic change radiates backward, in the form of a reagent erasure, into the retentional sphere” [Husserl 1974a, § 21].

12 As Cavaillès acknowledges: “One of the problems with the doctrine of science is precisely to conceive of progress not as an increase in volume by juxtaposition (what comes before lingers along with the new), but as incessant revision and deepening by trial and error. What comes after is more than what was before, not because it contains or perpetuates it, but because it necessarily proceeds from it, bearing in its content the peculiar mark of its superiority. There is more consciousness in it, and it is not the same consciousness” [Cavaillès 1987, 78].

13 In this sense, it seems to me that what Deleuze says about platonic idealism may be valid also for Husserl’s reflection on history, which would be a “selection of pretenders, the exclusion of the eccentric and divergent, in the name of a higher end, an essential reality or, even, a sense of history” [Deleuze 1969, 229].

14 Desanti shows the contradiction implicit in this “heroic” but “unsatisfactory” attempt to preserve a philosophy of evidence as a tool for a definitive foundation of science: “How to be assured, in full and apodictic evidence, of the necessary character of such referrals, if one does not already have a law of synthesis of the differentiated layers? [...] Now, wasn’t the problem to learn how to traverse it?” [see Desanti 1968, 122].

15 The figure of the triangle is “a certain modality of my hold on the world” [Merleau-Ponty 1945, Engl. transl., 406]. See [Hass & Hass 2000, 19–20].

16 Through this reflection, Merleau-Ponty rethinks Bergson’s concept of “retrograde movement of the true” [Bergson 2013] and connects it with an original elaboration of Husserlian concept of “institution” [Stiftung] [Merleau-Ponty 2015, 41–50], [1964, Engl. transl., 124], [1968, 59–65], [Al-Saji 2007], [Barbaras 2004, 99].

17 For a comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s and Deleuze’s thoughts on these themes, see [Lawlor 1998].

18 On the ontological value which the concept of expression has in Merleau-Ponty’s later thought, also in connection with the narrower, linguistic concept of expression, see [Landes 2013], [Waldenfels 2000].

19 For an analysis of Husserl’s reflection on the ante-predicative, in its foundational relationship with the linguistic domain, see [Bégout 2000]. Also in light of Bégout’s analysis of ante-predicative, I believe that Husserl’s reflection is insufficient because it is still immersed in this linguistic circle, according to which the ante-predicative is nothing but the premise and the mythical origin of the predicative: as the mythical origin of the sciences, it is the effect of a retrospective foundation. For a comparison between Merleau-Ponty’s and Derrida’s reflections on these themes, see [Lawlor 2002].

20 This is the relationship between epistemology and science as outlined by Desanti: “At the very moment in which he moves into this flat space in which objects, relations, operations, and signs are placed and considered as explicit themes, the mathematician has already moved into another space: that in which systems of reproductive gestures are concatenated, where motivations are inscribed, where theoretical complexes are torn apart. Systems that the mathematician, as such, cannot explore, on pain of the ceaseless unraveling of his theorems” [Desanti 1968, VI].

21 This is perhaps the point of the criticism that Cavaillès addresses to Husserl, by stating that physics would be, in his account of science, a mere “technical progress” to the natural sensible perception or transcendental aesthetics. By reducing the historical event to the “periodic manifestation of a permanent essence” [Cavaillès 1987, 70], Husserl refuses its radical novelty. On the contrary, to avoid the technical reduction of science, we should accept the risk of a “detachment of the science from itself” [Cavaillès 1987, 65 e, 69–70].

22 Nature is “self-production of sense”, says Merleau-Ponty in the course on the concept of nature [1995, 19].

23 In this conception, we can find the paradoxical unity of the three different senses that Galileo’s “fatal negligence” or “omission” [Husserl 1976a, § 9] has in Husserl’s thought, as they are recognized by Derrida, that is, as an empirical and contingent necessity, a “radical philosophical error”, or an “eidetic necessity” [Derrida 1962, 17, note I].

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Pietro Pasquinucci, « The Expressiveness of the Sciences and Their Crisis. A Rereading of the Origin of Geometry of Edmund Husserl »Philosophia Scientiæ, 29-1 | 2025, 95-112.

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Pietro Pasquinucci, « The Expressiveness of the Sciences and Their Crisis. A Rereading of the Origin of Geometry of Edmund Husserl »Philosophia Scientiæ [En ligne], 29-1 | 2025, mis en ligne le 14 février 2025, consulté le 21 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/philosophiascientiae/4590 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13cni

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University of Genoa (Italy)

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