Contributions To Phenomenology 77

Thomas M. Seebohm

History as a
Science and the
System of the
Sciences
Phenomenological Investigations
Contributions to Phenomenology

In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced

Research in Phenomenology

Volume 77

Series Editors
Nicolas de Warren, KU Leuven, Belgium
Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Ireland

Editorial Board
Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA
Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium
David Carr, Emory University, GA, USA
Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University Hong Kong, China
James Dodd, New School University, NY, USA
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, FL, USA
Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Italy
Burt Hopkins, Seattle University, WA, USA
José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University Hong Kong, China
Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Korea
Rosemary R.P. Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru
Dieter Lohmar, Universität zu Köln, Germany
William R. McKenna, Miami University, OH, USA
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, OH, USA
J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, PA, USA
Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Japan
Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, TN, USA
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Germany
Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy
Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL, USA
Shigeru Taguchi, Yamagata University, Japan
Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA
Scope
The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological
research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other
fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its estab-
lishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published nearly 60 titles
on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming
monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series
encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series
reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal
questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phe-
nomenological research.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811

Thomas M. Seebohm

History as a Science and the

System of the Sciences
Phenomenological Investigations

123
Thomas M. Seebohm (deceased)
Bonn, Germany

ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic)

Contributions to Phenomenology
ISBN 978-3-319-13586-1 ISBN 978-3-319-13587-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8

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Preface

A modern Socrates walking around in the marketplace of opinion that is offered

in the modern media will soon discover that very few dare to raise objections
against arguments starting with “science has shown that : : : .” What “science”
says is considered to be the final decider in the court of reason that determines
the answers for all questions that can be raised both in the region of theoretical
knowledge and in the region of technological solutions for practical problems. Such
arguments presuppose, of course, that it is known what a science is or ought to
be. And the Socratic question in this situation is, of course, “Tell me, dear friend,
what science is.” The experts for answers to this question in the last century, i.e.,
the epistemologists, offered two answers. Further Socratic questioning reveals that
diametrically opposed conclusions can be derived from the two answers.
The first answer is the answer of analytic philosophy, the modern version of
nineteenth century positivism. The answer is that sciences are real sciences only if
they are able to apply the methods of experimental research based on immediate
intersensory observations,1 and in addition they are real sciences only to the degree
in which they are also to apply mathematics. Only real sciences in this sense are able
to discover the laws of nature and to determine how things really are. The natural
sciences are sciences of the real world, i.e., of nature. The so-called human sciences
are sciences only to the degree to which they are able first to apply methods of
natural sciences and then, in a second step, to give reductive explanations for their
discoveries with the support of results from the natural sciences. This is the final
conclusion of the first answer.
The second answer distinguishes between the methods of the natural sciences and
those of the human sciences. Human sciences apply the methods of understanding
(Verstehen), i.e., of the interpretation of the manifestations, the life expressions,
in the cultural world. Natural sciences are sciences that apply the methods of
explanation and as nomothetic sciences they are interested in the discovery of causal

1
Note that in these investigations the term “intersensory” always refers to observation that is not
merely sensory but intersubjective.

v
vi Preface

laws determining the events in the natural world of what really is the case. There
are, hence, prima facie in general no serious differences in the judgments about
the methodology of the natural sciences between the defenders of the first and the
second answer. A second glance reveals, however, that the thesis of the defenders
of the second answer implies that the world of the human sciences, the cultural
world, has priority over the world of the natural sciences. This needs some further
explication.
The main objection that can be raised in defense of the second against the first
answer is that explanations in the human sciences have to presuppose what has to
be explained. What has to be explained are manifestations of cultural activities,
i.e., actions, interactions, speeches, but then also written speeches, texts, art works,
etc. Such manifestations are more than objects that can be given in intersensory
observations. They must be understood, i.e., they need interpretations. Explanations
in the human or cultural sciences presuppose, hence, interpretations. There is no way
to defend the objective validity of such explanations without a possible justification
of the objective validity of the presupposed interpretations with the aid of methods
that can serve as warrants for the objective validity of these interpretations.
The conclusion that can be derived from the principles of this argument for the
second answer says that the history of the natural sciences shows that the natural
sciences themselves are also manifestations of specific activities in specific phases
of cultural history. The natural sciences can, hence, ultimately be reduced to the
problem of understanding interpretations of nature in the human sciences. This
conclusion is diametrically opposed to the conclusion that is derivable from the
first answer.
However, this argument also reveals the weak spot in the second answer.
There is, on the one hand, philology as the historical human science that can be
recognized as a “pure” science of interpretation. There are, on the other hand,
historical human sciences that presuppose interpretations of texts, monuments, and
artifacts, but their main interest ultimately lies in reconstructions of “what really
happened” and explanations of “why has it happened,” i.e., an interest in “historical”
facts and causal explanations of these facts. It is, hence, possible to maintain a
strict distinction between a scientific methodology of explanation and a scientific
methodology of interpretation, but it is not possible to use this distinction between
different methodologies as a justification for a strict separation between the natural
and the human sciences.
A reader of the second volume of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, with the
subtitle Investigations Pertaining to the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge,
as well as the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomeno-
logical Philosophy, Book I, is left with the impression that phenomenological
investigations will be able to give a consistent and final answer to the question of
what a science really is and to offer an outline of a system of different types of
theoretical disciplines that can be recognized as sciences. Looking then into Ideas
II and the later works of Husserl, the reader is left, however, with the somewhat
disappointing impression that Husserl obviously shares the above-mentioned second
answer, emphasizing a transcendental and even metaphysical priority of the world
Preface vii

of the cultural or spiritual sciences over the world of the natural sciences. It is also
disappointing to discover that, though Husserl offers a general theory of knowledge
and a philosophy of science, he says almost nothing about a phenomenological
epistemology of the sciences and a system of the sciences, i.e., what is missing
are critical descriptive analyses of the methodologies of the sciences.
Phenomenology is not a doctrine or a closed philosophical system. It is,
according to Husserl, a research program. Having the above-mentioned incompat-
ibilities, shortcomings, and doubts in mind, it is, hence, the aim of the following
investigations to develop a consistent system of a phenomenological epistemology.
The expectation that such investigations should begin with the natural sciences
is reasonable. It is reasonable because seen from the viewpoint of the history of
the sciences, it is obvious that the development of the modern empirical sciences
begins with the emergence of the natural sciences and that the claim that the
so-called human sciences are indeed sciences was only raised later, first for the
historical human sciences and then for psychology and the social human sciences.
The summary of the conclusion at the end of the following investigation will follow
this order. But the methodology of research in history as a science—not history as
a collection of narratives—and in the historical human sciences has been a blind
spot in phenomenological epistemological reflections. Therefore, the investigation
(Part I, Sect. 4.5; Part II, Chap. 5) will begin with the epistemological problems of
the historical human sciences, proceed from there to the prima facie diametrically
opposed problems of the natural sciences, and deal with psychology and the social
human sciences at the end.
This outline of the system of the sciences, and the additional thesis that history
as a science is the mediator in the alleged opposition of the natural and the human
sciences, is incompatible with both of the considered above answers to the question
“what is a science.” It is, however, in agreement both with our lived experience in
a lifeworld with sciences and with the foundations of a lifeworld with sciences in
the structure of practical interactions with the natural environment in pre-scientific
lifeworlds (Part I, Sect. 3.5; Part II, Chap. 6; Part IV, Chap. 9).

Thomas M. Seebohm
Acknowledgements

Given the circumstances, the research work preparing the investigations of this book
would not have been possible without the continuing supply of recent publications
and information about editions of the phenomenological traditions in the United
States (especially the tradition of the New School, Dorion Cairns, Felix Kaufmann,
Aron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schutz, provided by Lester Embree) and the “Center for
Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc.” Embree read also drafts of chapters of
the book and gave valuable advice for the technical terminology and the general
structure of the whole.1 I highly appreciate and am thankful for Dr. Elizabeth
Behnke’s work as copyeditor of the book, including her advice for polishing the
style and editorial problems in the bibliography. I am also very thankful for the
support in finding solutions for technical problems and the formatting of the text of
my technical advisor Michael Rang. I appreciate and I am thankful for the decision
of the editorial board and the editors of the Contributions to Phenomenology series
and to the publisher, Springer, for accepting and publishing the book.

1
Before he became ill, my friend sent me a printout of the whole of his book. I marked a number
of typographical errors and suggested divisions of some long paragraphs and sent it back. When
I was sadly honored with the request to see the work though the press, this marked-up copy was
sent back to me and showed not only that most of the suggested divisions and corrections were
accepted but also that some errors I had overlooked had been caught by the author. After making
these corrections, all that the text lacked were abstracts for the chapters. Here I soon gave up
composing them myself and instead have formed the abstracts out of the section headings within
the chapters. I am grateful to my assistant, Elliot Shaw for his help. Lester Embree, July 2014.

ix
Obituary

Thomas M. Seebohm
Thomas Mulvany Seebohm died at home in Bonn surrounded by his wife and
three sons on August 25. He was born on July 7, 1934 in Gleiwitz.
Due in part to the times in Germany after the war, after graduating in classical
gymnasium in 1952, he learned cabinetmaking, becoming a journeyman in 1954.
He then studied Philosophy, Slavic Languages, Slavonic Literature, and Sociology
at the Universities of Bonn, Saarbrűcken, and Mainz, receiving his doctorate in
Philosophy summa cum laude in 1960 with Die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit der
Transzendentalphilosophie (Bonn 1962). From 1960 to 1965 he studied medieval
Russian philosophy and culture further, eventually publishing Ratio und Charisma.
Ansatz zur Ausbildung eines philosophisches und wissenschaftlichen Weltverständ-
nisses im Moskauer Russland (Bonn 1977).
Seebohm began teaching as an Assistant at Mainz in 1965, and was a Visiting
Professor at the Pennsylvania State University in 1970–1972 and at Trier in 1973.
He was then a Full Professor at Penn State 1973–1984, with additional visiting
professorships at the New School for Social Research in 1980 and at Heidelberg in
1981. He was a Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology,
Inc. since the 1970s. And finally he returned to Mainz as the successor of Gerhard
Funke in 1984 and retired in 1999.
Further books are Zur Kritik der hermeneutischen Vernunft (Bonn 1972),
Philosophie der Logik. Handbuch Philosophie (Freiburg 1984), Elementare
formalsierte Logik (Freiburg 1991), Hermeneutics: Method and Methodology
(Dordrecht 2004), and, finally, a comprehensive phenomenological epistemology,
History as a Science and the System of the Sciences (Dordrecht, in press).
There is a Festschrift, Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics,
and Logic (ed. O.K. Wiegand et al., Dordrecht: 2000), with an Introduction by
Joseph Kockelmans on the accomplishments until then that fit that title and that
made Thomas cry when he read it. Kocklemans’s summary is that, “above all See-
bohm considered himself a creative phenomenologist who as a critically reflecting

xi
xii Obituary

philosopher would look at all major issues with which he became confronted from
a transcendental point of view” (p. 3). From helping with the last book, I can add
that Thomas also found a final affinity with the New School tendency in American
phenomenology, i.e., Dorion Cairns, Aron Gurwitsch, and Alfred Schutz.

Lester Embree
Contents

1 Introduction .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1 What is Epistemology and What is a Phenomenological
Epistemology? .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Extensions and Modifications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Part I Phenomenological Preliminaries

2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions

of a Phenomenological Epistemology .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.1 Phenomenology: From Descriptive Psychology
to Descriptive Epistemology .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2 Wholes and Parts, Formal Ontology, and the Idea
of a Mathesis Universalis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.3 Essences and Eidetic Intuition .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.4 Intersubjectivity, the Paradox of Subjectivity,
and Ultimate Grounding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions
of a Phenomenological Epistemology in the Structures
of the Lifeworld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.1 The Primordial Sphere, the Givenness of the Other,
and Animalic Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
3.2 A Typology of Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
3.3 The Static Analysis of Social Interactions in the Lifeworld .. . . . . . . 52
3.4 The Generative Structures of Socio-Cultural
Developments in the Lifeworld .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.5 Causal Relations and Facts in the Lifeworld .. . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps
Toward a Phenomenological Epistemology .. . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4.1 The Emergence of the Human Sciences in the
European Tradition .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

xiii
xiv Contents

4.2 Dilthey’s and Rickert’s System of the Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

4.3 Critical Remarks About the Traditional Division
Between the Natural and the Human Sciences. .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
4.4 Critical Remarks About the System of the Human
Sciences in Rickert, Dilthey, and Schutz . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
4.5 An Outline of the Basic Problems
of a Phenomenological Epistemology of the Empirical Sciences .. 85

Part II The Methodology of the Historical Human Sciences

5 History as a Science of Interpretation .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

5.1 Doctrines of Methods of Humanistic Disciplines
and the Problem of the Developments
of Methodologies for the Human Sciences. . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
5.2 The Canons of Hermeneutics: A Critical Re-Examination .. . . . . . . . 110
5.3 An Epistemological Analysis of the First Canon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
5.4 The Application of the First and the Second Canon
to the Interpretation of Fixed Life Expressions .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
5.5 The Application of a Modified Version of the First
Canon to Historical Reconstructions . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
6 Causal Explanations in History .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
6.1 Logical Structures of Causal Explanations in History .. . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
6.2 General Epistemological Structures of Historical
Causal Explanations .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
6.3 The Typology of Real Conditions and Its Significance
for the Methodology of Causal Explanations in History . . . . . . . . . . . 140
6.4 Historical Critique and the Falsification of Historical
Explanations .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
6.5 Interpretation, Application, and Historical Reality:
Summary and Transition .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

Part III The Methodology of the Natural Sciences

7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of

the Natural Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
7.1 Basic Problems of the Epistemology of the Natural Sciences . . . . . 161
7.2 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude
of the Natural Sciences.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
8.1 The Problem of the Application of Mathematical
Formalisms in the Natural Sciences: Historical
and Phenomenological Preliminaries.. . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
Contents xv

8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their

Application in the Natural Sciences, and Their
Foundations in the Lifeworld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
8.3 The Ontological Interpretation of Classical Physics .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations
of the Mathematical Formalisms in Post-Classical Physics .. . . . . . . 222
8.5 The Empirical Basis and Theories in the Life Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

Part IV The Natural Sciences, the Historical Human

Sciences, and the Systematic Human Sciences

9 History and the Natural Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

9.1 The History of Nature and History as a Human Science . . . . . . . . . . . 257
9.2 Technology in a Cultural Lifeworld with Sciences
and Instrumentalism .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
10.1 Between Interpretation and Observation: General
Methodological Problems of the Systematic Human Sciences.. . . . 277
10.2 Interpretation and Prediction.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284
10.3 Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296
10.4 The Social Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions
in the Lifeworld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329
10.6 From Jurisprudence and the Science of the Law
to Politics and Political Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 346
10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361

Part V Summary and Conclusions

11 Summary and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379

11.1 Naturalism, Historicism, Historism and the Paradox
of Subjectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
11.2 The Generative Foundations of the Empirical Sciences
in the Lifeworld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks . . . . . 396

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 415

Name Index .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423

Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425

List of Abbreviations

Dilthey GS Wilhelm Dilthey. Gesammelte Schriften. Bd. I–XII. Stuttgart:

Teubner; Bd. XIII–XX. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht,
1914–1990.
Dilthey SW Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Works, ed. R. Makkreel et al., 6 vols.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985ff.
EP Encyclopedia of phenomenology, ed. L. Embree et al. Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1997.
Husserl CW Collected Works. The Hague/Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff/Kluwer/
Springer, 1980ff.
Husserl Hua Husserliana: Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke. Den Haag/
Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff/Kluwer/Springer, 1950ff.
Kant KGS Immanuel Kant. Kants gesammelte Schriften, ed. Königlich Preußis-
chen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
1902ff.
Peirce CP Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. C. Hartshorne et al.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935.
Schutz CP Collected Papers. The Hague/Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff/Kluwer/
Springer, 1962ff.

xvii
Chapter 1
Introduction

The goals of this investigations will be discussed in detail with the necessary
references to the literature in the last chapter of part I. What follows in this intro-
duction are preparatory remarks about guiding viewpoints for the phenomenological
analyses of the method and the subject matter of the following investigations.

1.1 What is Epistemology and What is a Phenomenological

Epistemology?

The first task of an epistemology is to determine the requirements of the systems

of intentional cognitive acts that can be recognized as sciences. All theoretical
and practical activities that are guided by a systematic doctrine of methods are
disciplines. Two requirements have to be satisfied by a discipline for it to be
recognized as a science. The first requirement is that the discipline is a purely
theoretical activity and all interests in practical applications of the results of
scientific investigations are in brackets. The second requirement is that the discipline
is guided by a methodology. A methodology is a doctrine of methods that warrants
objective validity, i.e., a validity that is an intersubjective validity in principle of
the results of scientific research. The first task of a methodology is to determine the
region of the type of objects and states of affairs that can count as legitimate objects
of the science, and in terms of a phenomenological ontology, this means that it has
to determine the categorial structure of the ontological region of the science. The
second task is to determine the logical structure and the ontological implications of
the methods that can serve as warrants for the objective validity of the judgments
of a science about the objects and states of affairs in the ontological region of the
science. These two tasks are correlates.
A caveat has to be added: There are indeed respectable academic disciplines, e.g.,
jurisprudence and engineering, that presuppose one or more scientific disciplines,

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 1

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_1
2 1 Introduction

but their main concerns are methods for the professional application of the results
of research in the presupposed sciences. Moreover there are academic theoretical
disciplines such as literary criticism or rhetoric that do require respectable scholar-
ship and scholarly skills guided by doctrines of methods yet are unable to satisfy the
requirements of a scientific methodology.
The tasks of epistemological reflections on a science are to analyze the different
logical and ontological requirements of the different methodologies of the different
sciences; to justify its claim to offer theories that are intersubjectively valid in
principle for all researchers who are willing to apply the methodology; and to
determine the scope and the limits of this claim. Two abstract epistemological dis-
tinctions between two basic principles determining different types of sciences must
be sufficient for the purposes of an introduction. A first epistemological distinction
that is of basic significance for the following investigations is the methodological
distinction between the empirical and the formal sciences. The methodology that is
able to confirm or disconfirm assumptions in the formal sciences is the methodology
of formal proofs and decision procedures. The methodologies in the empirical or
positive sciences are weaker. They presuppose an empirical basis in intersensory
observation that are able, within certain limits, to test the hypothetical assumptions
in different types of empirical sciences. Assumptions that are not disconfirmed in
certain contexts of empirical intersensory observation are confirmed for this context
of observations but such confirmation is always open for revisions in further tests
in the future. It is essential to note that this general description is not only able
to cover the testing of hypotheses in experimental research in the natural sciences,
but also covers, e.g., the methodology of disconfirming or confirming hypothetical
interpretations of texts with the aid of applications of the first canon of philological
hermeneutics.
Epistemological reflections appear after the emergence of the sciences in modern
philosophy as an appendix to a general theory of theoretical knowledge. A general
theory of knowledge appears in the context of phenomenological investigations as
the intentional analysis of the relation between intentional objects or cogitata and
intentional acts or cogitationes. A general theory of cognition in this sense includes
philosophical knowledge and religious experiences, but also the knowledge that is
implied in the actions and interactions of everyday practical life. In the philosophical
tradition reflections on the general theory of cognition have been guided by assumed
universal principles about the nature of truth and being, e.g., in the tradition of
modern metaphysics since Descartes, in Kantian transcendental philosophy, and in
David Hume’s and John Stuart Mill’s empiricisms, or the assumption that logic
itself is transcendental in modern analytic philosophy, etc. The assumption of such
principles has always implied that an epistemology also has the character of a
normative discipline. It says what scientists ought to do. The universal principles
differ, but all of these theories of knowledge and implied epistemologies presuppose
in addition more or less precise descriptions of the activities of the human mind
in general and of the methodologies guiding the different types of sciences. The
descriptive aspects in general theories of knowledge and epistemologies in the
1.1 What is Epistemology and What is a Phenomenological Epistemology? 3

development of traditional philosophy after the emergence of the sciences can be

of interest for and used in investigations of a phenomenological epistemology.
According to the subtitle of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, phenomenology
is, as already mentioned above, a general theory of knowledge. A general theory
of knowledge covers the entire realm of intentional acts and their correlates, the
intentional objects, and their foundations in passive syntheses. Setting aside the
phenomenology of knowing aesthetic and ethical objects, the main focus of interest
in the Logical Investigations is theoretical knowledge. A phenomenology of knowl-
edge in this narrower sense is the backdrop of a phenomenological epistemology.
This backdrop is present and presupposed in a phenomenological epistemology as
the pure descriptive explication of the general structures of conscious life. None of
the hypothetical metaphysical presuppositions of traditional philosophical theories
of knowledge are admitted. The presupposed structures that are pre-given for a
phenomenological epistemology are as follows:
(1) the ego cogito cogitatum, i.e., the correlation of intentional acts and their
intentional subject and objects;
(2) the analysis of the constitution of the givenness of ideal objects, i.e., the mor-
phological essences and the exact essences given in material eidetic intuition
and the formal essences of formal apophantics and formal ontology given in
formal categorial intuition (Sects. 2.3 and 2.4);
(3) the structure of the subjective inner temporality and inner spatiality of the
givenness of the hyletic field and the intentional acts reacting in the last
instance to affections triggered by contrast phenomena in the hyletic field (this
level is of significance not only for the phenomenology of association and
habits, including passive syntheses, but also for the analysis for appräsentations
in which Others and in general the correlation of a developed individual
subjectivity and intersubjective community are given in lived experience);
(4) the essential distinctions between static phenomenological analyses and genetic
and generative phenomenological analyses;
(5) the phenomenological analysis of the lifeworld as the foundation of intersub-
jective experience given in the double aspects of the individual experience of
the lifeworld and the phenomenology of the social world. The descriptions of
both perspectives are descriptions of eidetic structures and presuppose eidetic
intuition.
It is a tacit presupposition of general theories of knowledge in modern philosophy
from the beginning in the sixteenth to the twentieth century, i.e., from Descartes and
Locke via Kant to modern positivism and analytic philosophy, that the empirical
basis for observations in the empirical sciences is given in the sense experience of
individual objects. It is sometimes mentioned that observations are “verifiable” only
as intersensory observations without reflecting upon the implications of this require-
ment. It is, on the contrary, an explicit general principle of a phenomenological
theory of knowledge and, therefore, also of a phenomenological epistemology that
the objective validity of knowledge is only possible as intersubjective validity and
4 1 Introduction

that sensory observation can, therefore, serve as objectively valid observations only
as intersensory, i.e., intersubjective sensory, observation. It is not the Cartesian ego
cogito in splendid isolation that is the correlate of scientific evidence; instead only
a community of researchers in a science can be understood as the intersubjective
correlate of objectively valid knowledge and understanding.

1.2 Extensions and Modifications

Seen from the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology, the basic short-

coming of Husserl’s analyses is that he was not very interested in methodological
problems. There is a certain disinterest in the methodology, i.e., the mathematical
operations or techniques, of mathematicians and of formalized logic in the analyses
of formal ontology as a mathesis universalis and especially in the phenomenology
of mathematics. Nothing is said about the difference between classical mathematics
and modern mathematics, including non-Euclidean geometries and higher algebra
with transcendent, imaginary, and complex numbers (part I, Sect. 2.2; part III, Sect.
8.3). Except for the reflections on the application of mathematics in the natural
sciences as empirical sciences, not very much is said about the methodological
significance of this application for the natural sciences and the differences in the
application of mathematics in physics and chemistry as hard sciences, in the life
sciences as soft natural sciences, and in the human sciences, e.g., in economics, but
not only in economics (part IV, Sect. 10.6). Nothing is said about the difference
between classical and post-classical physics or about the difference between the
type of mathematics that has been applied in classical physics and the mathematics
in post-classical physics (part III, Sects. 8.3 and 8.4).
Almost nothing is said about the significance of the methodology of experimental
research in the natural sciences. Husserl emphasized the affinity between his
transcendental phenomenology and Dilthey’s universal human science (universale
Geisteswissenschaft) in his later writings (part I, esp. Sects. 4.3 and 4.5). The
historical world is seen as the world of the spirit, and the human sciences,
understood as sciences of the spirit, are understood as the best preparation for
the transition to the phenomenological attitude. However, nothing is said about
Dilthey’s reflections on the methodology of the historical human sciences. Nothing
is said about philology and the central problem for Dilthey and the methodologists
of the nineteenth century, namely, the methodology of the interpretation of texts and
archaeological interpretation, in short, the philological-historical method.
To fill these gaps is a necessary presupposition for a phenomenological episte-
mology. Required are significant extensions together with some modifications of the
analyses that can be found in Husserl’s writings.
(1) Formal apophantics, i.e., logical grammar, and formal ontology are, as Husserl
himself emphasized, of basic significance for the phenomenological method
1.2 Extensions and Modifications 5

itself, last but not least for the method of eidetic intuition and with it for the
theory of material ontological regions. Required is
(1.a) an extension of the theory of the whole and the parts. These extensions
are presuppositions for the analysis of the methodology of the human sci-
ences, and they are in addition of significance for the material ontological
region of the life sciences (part I, Sect. 2.2): moreover,
(1.b) precisions are required in the formal ontology of units, collections, and
numbers, i.e., the region of mathematical ideal objects. The precisions are
necessary for the analysis of the application of mathematical formalisms
in the hard sciences, especially in physics (part I, Sect. 2.2; part III,
Sect. 8.3). But in addition,
(1.c) there are problems in Husserl’s final characterization of the system of
formal ontological categories (on “category” and related terms see part I,
Sect. 2.2). The main problem for an epistemology of the empirical
sciences is whether the relation of the theory of whole and the parts, on
the one hand, and the theory of units and manifolds, the mathematical
categories, on the other hand, are simply two disciplines of the mathesis
universalis on the same level, or whether the second is on a level of higher
universality of formalizing abstraction than the first.
(2) Further extensions and modifications are necessary for the phenomenological
analysis of the foundations of the sciences in the lifeworld.
(2.a) The analysis of the ontological region of the empirical human sciences
requires the analysis of the categories of the phenomenology of the social
world and phenomenological psychology, the phenomenological descrip-
tive analysis of individual experience of the social world, including
its natural environment. Husserl’s main interest was phenomenological
psychology, but the phenomenology of the social world provided by
Schutz can be considered as a consistent extension of Husserl’s analyses
of the basic structures of the lifeworld. Only minor modifications that
have the character of precisions will be necessary (part I, Sects. 4.4 and
4.5; part IV, esp. Sect. 10.5).
(2.b) Missing but necessary for a phenomenological epistemology of the
human sciences is a typology of different types of understanding. Under-
standing is used in Husserl (but also, e.g., in Schutz, Heidegger, and
elsewhere) as the highest universal category that covers all cogitative
types and their intentional objects and, by the same token, is the basic
category of the human sciences. Essential for a phenomenological epis-
temology are the distinctions between first-order elementary and higher
understanding and second-order elementary and higher understanding
(part I, Sect. 3.2). Elementary understanding will be characterized as
the understanding at work in the interactions of practical life and higher
understanding as the contemplative theoretical understanding of the
6 1 Introduction

lifeworld, of the human condition in religion, art, philosophy, and last

but not least, the sciences. First-order understanding is the understanding
of intentional objects given in passive and active cognitive syntheses,
and secondary understanding is the understanding of the first-order
understanding of Others. As sciences of interpretation the human sciences
are restricted to second-order understanding. The natural sciences are a
specific type of higher understanding, but they also have foundations in
elementary understanding.
(2.c) Causality, matter, and form are already basic categories of pre-scientific
ontology. Explications of these categories in terms of the methodologies
of the different empirical sciences are also of basic significance for
epistemological reflections on the sciences. It is, hence, necessary for
a phenomenological epistemology to analyze the constitution of these
categorial structures on the level of solipsistic primordial experience; in
the context of elementary understanding as foundations for the cognitive
attitude of the sciences; in the context of pre-scientific ontological reflec-
tions in higher understanding; and finally in the contexts of the explication
of these categories not only in the empirical natural sciences but also
in the empirical human sciences. Viewpoints guiding such analyses can
be found in Husserl’s writings, but in this case a phenomenological
epistemology also presupposes in this case precisions and extensions (part
I, Sect. 3.5, part II, Chap. 6, part III, Sects. 8.1 and 8.4; part IV, Sects. 9.
2, 10.1 and 10.3). Together with the extensions (2.b), the extensions (2.c)
are of basic significance because they indicate that a radical opposition
of the natural sciences as sciences of causal explanations and the human
sciences as sciences of understanding does not hold water.
(3) It was a philosophical, even a metaphysical, principle of many scientists, and in
the philosophical theories of knowledge, that science, first of all physics, will
be able to offer theories that tell us how the things in themselves really are.
It has also been a widely accepted thesis since the eighteenth century that the
methods of physics cannot be applied in all empirical sciences, first of all in
the life sciences, but that it will be possible to reduce the explanations of all
phenomena belonging to the life sciences, and even of the human sciences, to
the principles that can be derived from the hard sciences.
(3.a) The determination of the region of objects that belong to the empirical
basis of an empirical science in the all-inclusive region of the lifeworld
has the character of an abstraction. Husserl’s account of the type of
reductive abstraction that is constitutive for the cognitive attitude of the
empirical natural sciences in general can be used as a starting point, but
needs significant extensions and modifications. The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcedental Phenomenology and earlier writings mention
prima facie only one abstractive reduction for the natural sciences in
general. Considered more closely, however, two abstractions can be
distinguished. The first reduction abstracts from the purposes and values
1.2 Extensions and Modifications 7

of everyday practical life, and in general from all contents that are
given in lived experience and reflections on lived experience. The second
abstractive reduction abstracts from all secondary qualities of observable
objects that are given in the residuum of the first abstraction, reducing
them to primary qualities. The first abstraction determines the ontological
region of the natural sciences in general, including the life sciences. The
second abstraction determines, within this broader region, the empirical
basis and the methodology of the hard sciences, physics and chemistry
insofar as it can be reduced to physics. Only ontological categories that
are explicable in terms of mathematics can be admitted in the residuum
of the second abstraction (part III, Sects. 8.1, 8.2 and 9.1).
(3.b) According to Husserl’s later writings and especially the Crisis, the region
of the objects of the natural sciences is the residuum of a reductive
abstraction. It is as such a region that is separated from and opposed
to the region of the concrete lifeworld as a whole, and the lifeworld as
a whole is understood as the ontological region of the human sciences.
Presupposing this interpretation, it will be difficult, quite apart from
further complications, to distinguish between the historical or spiritual
world of the human sciences and pure phenomenology.
Closer epistemological reflections on the methods and possible methodologies
of the human sciences indicate, however, that there is a general but not necessarily
immediately reductive abstraction that determines the region of the empirical basis
of the human sciences in general as a region within the concrete lifeworld. There
are in addition other abstractions that are able to determine the scope and the limits
for methodologically guided philological interpretations of fixed life expressions,
i.e., a hermeneutics, understood as a methodology for the interpretation of fixed life
expressions (Sects. 4.5, 5.3 and 5.4). In the following investigations abstractions
that determine in their residuum the region of objects that can be objects of a
methodology of a science will be called methodological abstractions.
The main intention of the following investigation is, hence, to give a phe-
nomenological answer to the general question “what are the empirical sciences”
and to offer some guidelines for further investigations in the different branches
of a phenomenological epistemology. Such further investigations are invited and
necessary to provide not only extensions but also corrections of what has been
said in this investigation in the future. Phenomenology and therefore also a
phenomenological epistemology is not a closed system. It is an open research
program.
A final remark about references to Husserl and in general to the literature in the
following investigation must be added. References to the literature indicate critical
systematic applications and not methodologically guided interpretations. Thus in
talking, e.g., about “ideal types,” there will be references to the writings of Alfred
Schutz. What then follows is not an interpretation of the meaning of the term in
Schutz, but an explication of the meaning of the term in the context of the analyses
of the system of the empirical sciences in the following investigations.
 Part I
Phenomenological Preliminaries
Chapter 2
The Formal Methodological Presuppositions
of a Phenomenological Epistemology

2.1 Phenomenology: From Descriptive Psychology

to Descriptive Epistemology

The ability to observe and to give reliable descriptions of observations is a necessary

presupposition for research in the natural sciences. The task of descriptions is
to secure that other researchers in the field are able to recognise the species of
immediately given objects they want to explicate or to explain. The descriptions
of observations, including observations of experimental situations, ought to be
free from all prejudices, including previously accepted taxonomic systems and
explanations and, in general, logical deductions. Well-known examples for such
phenomenological descriptions are the verbal and pictorial descriptions of species
of animals and plants in the life sciences. The technical term for the discipline
responsible for such descriptions of scientific observations in the second half
of the nineteenth century was “phenomenology.” Phenomenology was the art
of descriptions of observations, i.e., of the appearances of states of affairs for
intersubjectively accessible sensory experience. Though causal explanations and
pre-given taxonomic systems are in brackets for such descriptions, the latter should
emphasize what might be of methodological significance in experimental situations
or for the construction of taxonomic systems. Phenomenology in this sense is not
a science, but an indispensable foundation of the natural and cultural or human
sciences. It was understood as a refinement of nineteenth century empiricism, first
of all the empiricism of John Stuart Mill, and it is compatible with the positivistic
naturalism of the nineteenth century.1
Psychology as an empirical natural science came into existence in the second
half of the nineteenth century and from the very beginning it implied naturalistic

1
The leading naturalist at the time of Carl Stumpf in Germany was Ernst Haeckel.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 11

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_2
12 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

psychologism.2 The thesis that philosophical epistemology can be reduced to

psychology triggered the controversy between psychologists and the defenders of
traditional philosophical epistemologies, first of all the Neo-Kantians. If psychology
is recognized as one empirical science among others, then it is also necessary
to apply phenomenology in the sense mentioned above in the descriptions of
psychic phenomena. According to Carl Stumpf, such descriptions must prepare and
accompany the development of psychological theories and the test of such theories
with the aid of experimental psychology.3 In this new context phenomenology is
more than a description of objects given in direct intention. Applied to psychology
it is the discipline of the reflective description of phenomena. Phenomenological
descriptions in all other natural science refer to observations of objects given in
the direct intention of the outer senses. Reflections on data of the inner sense have
no place in the observations of physics, chemistry, and biology. The descriptions
of psychology, however, also refer to objects given in the oblique intention of the
inner sense. The struggle between empiricists and rationalists in modern philosophy
was first of all a struggle about what is given in the self-givenness of subjectivity in
the inner sense. The problems connected with the difference between observations
in direct and oblique intention were the first weak spot in the arguments of the
naturalistic psychologists of the nineteenth century.
The application of phenomenology to psychology caused two additional prob-
lems, the problem of the epistemological status of the human sciences and that
of the epistemological status of formal logic and mathematics. Both are, in the
last instance, aspects of the general problem of psychologism. The phenomena of
psychology are objects given oblique intention, i.e., they are given in reflection.
Psychic acts and their contents appear in reflective descriptions as an inseparable
unity. Seen from this viewpoint psychology is the foundation of the subjective as
well as the objective aspect of epistemology in general and of the epistemological
problems of all sciences. The question was whether or not the epistemology of
the human sciences can be reduced to the epistemology of the natural sciences.
According to Carl Stumpf and others, psychology is a science only if it is able
to apply the methods of causal explanation and of the experimental checks of
hypothetically assumed theories about causal connections. Phenomenology is only
a preparatory discipline for this purpose, and only in this sense is it the foundation
of psychology as a science. According to Wilhelm Dilthey, however, descriptive
psychology is a human science, and in addition the foundation of the human sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften).4
The thesis that ideal objects (and with them, the truths of formal and formalized
logic and mathematics) have to be understood and explained as psychic phenomena
is an immediate implication of radical psychologism. The countersensical and

2
Naturalistic psychology was already predominant in Germany one generation before Carl Stumpf,
e.g., in the research of Hermann von Helmholtz.
3
Spiegelberg 1960, vol. I, esp. 59f.
4
See below, Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2.
2.1 Phenomenology: From Descriptive Psychology to Descriptive Epistemology 13

paradoxical consequences of the attempt to reduce a-temporal and necessary truth

to empirical evidence is the second weak spot of naturalistic psychologism.5
According to Carl Stumpf, the founder of experimental psychology and teacher of
Husserl, the phenomena of phenomenology in the old sense are the correlates of
psychical functions. But as objects of psychology these psychic functions are also
phenomena. Stumpf’s psychological functions can be understood as analogues of
Franz Brentano’s intentional acts. Whether Brentano is a psychologist is a disputed
question. It is, however, obvious that Stumpf explicitly rejected psychologism.6 The
correlates of his psychic functions, the phenomena, are not parts but counterparts
of psychic functions, or, as Husserl following Brentano later said, the correlates of
intentional acts.7
Stumpf distinguished between primary phenomena, the contents of immediate
sensuous experience, and secondary phenomena, the images of memory: but also
between phenomenology and eidology. The phenomena of objective descriptions
of observations are counterparts of immediate sensual experiences. Seen from the
viewpoint of naturalistic empiricism, it is acceptable to maintain that the contents of
such descriptions cannot be reduced to psychic phenomena. They represent mind-
independent objective reality. It is also acceptable that the contents of secondary
phenomena, the images of memory, refer to real objects. The objects of eidology
are, however, constructs formed by the mind, e.g., the distinction between dependent
parts or attributes and independent substrates, or the structural laws between sensual
materials like color and extension, and the structural laws of states of affairs.8 All of
this foreshadows the exposition of the system of the formal ontological and logico-
grammatical categories in Husserl’s LI and his theory of eidetic intuition in general
and not only of formal but also of material essences.9
Stumpf’s position is ambiguous. He rejected the thesis that the objects of
eidology can be discovered with the aid of empirical induction. He asserted that
the discovery of the constructs presupposes free variation in imagination and that
this free variation is able to distinguish between necessary, possible, and impossible
structures of the constructs. Finally, he rejected the thesis that such possibilities and

5
Husserl’s arguments against a psychologism that has its foundations in empirical psychology in
ch. 3–8 of the first volume of the Logical Investigations I (henceforth LI) are, seen with a grain of
salt, similar to the arguments of the Neo-Kantians and have been praised by the Neo-Kantian Paul
Natorp.
6
Stumpf rejected psychologism in this sense, but he also rejected the dominating epistemology
of the Neo-Kantians without indicating what kind of epistemology ought to replace it. See
Spiegelberg 1960 vol. I, 56; on Brentano and intentionality see 39ff.
7
Spiegelberg 1960, vol. I. esp. 58ff.
8
Spiegelberg 1960 vol. I, 63f.
9
Essentia is the Latin counterpart of the Greek eidos in the philosophical terminology of Classical
Antiquity and the Middle Ages. For the sake of simplicity this investigation prefers Latin terms,
e.g., reductio/reduction for epochē.
14 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

impossibilities can be explained as abilities and inabilities of the human mind. The
justification both for the rejections and for the assumption of an eidology is his
conception of descriptive psychology.
The second problem is that his descriptive phenomenology refers to empirical
observation. Descriptions of empirical observation are, taken by themselves, not yet
a science. A psychological descriptive account of the givenness of ideal objects,
and especially the objects of the formal sciences implies that the epistemology
of the formal sciences, appears as a branch of an empirical science. The paradox
of this consequence is that the epistemology of the formal sciences of a-temporal
ideal objects has the status of a branch of an empirical science. The upshot is that
Stumpf’s position, in spite of his rejections, once again implies again psychologism.
Quite apart from the possibility of returning to old paradigms of epistemology, first
of all Neo-Kantianism,10 the paradox creates a dilemma for the understanding of
phenomenology. One horn of the dilemma is to live with that paradox. This is the
choice of naturalistic psychologism. The other horn of the dilemma is to apply
phenomenology and phenomenological descriptions immediately to epistemology
of the formal sciences and the empirical sciences.
Husserl’s choice was to apply phenomenological descriptions immediately to
epistemology.11 The subtitle of the second volume of the Logical Investigations
is Investigations Pertaining to a Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge.12 The
assumption that phenomenology can be applied in epistemological investigations
about the formal sciences and, in general, to ideal objects implies that phenomenol-
ogy cannot be understood as descriptive psychology. Seen with hindsight, the
transition began in the first edition of the Logical Investigations and came to a
preliminary end in the reflections on the methods of such investigations in Ideas
Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy I 13
and in “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science.”14
Phenomenology is in this phase of its development the method not only of
epistemology, but also of all other disciplines of philosophy, especially including
ethics and value theory. The reflective phenomenological attitude is the reverse of

10
Husserl criticized the Kantian and Neo-Kantian interpretation of the a priori as transcendental
psychologism several times in the LI. For his critique of Kant’s mistaken theory of the a priori,
cf. also Hua III, 145; Hua VII, 198f. Categorial structures are not immediately given in the acts of
consciousness. They are objective correlates of the acts of consciousness in which they are given.
11
Stumpf rejected Husserl’s new conception of phenomenology after Husserl rejected the definition
of phenomenology as descriptive psychology in the second edition of the LI. See Spiegelberg
1960 vol. I, 65f. Husserl criticized his own characterization of phenomenology as descriptive
psychology in the first edition of the LI in the preface to the second edition. Descriptive psychology
is descriptive phenomenology in the old sense, i.e., it is not the description of experience or classes
of experiences of empirical persons or of natural events in general.
12
Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. The usual translation Phe-
nomenology and Theory of Knowledge is an abbreviation.
13
In Hua III.
14
In Hua XXV.
2.1 Phenomenology: From Descriptive Psychology to Descriptive Epistemology 15

the natural attitude. The world as the totality of states of affairs is immediately
given for the natural attitude in direct intention. But what is already given in direct
intention in the natural attitude is given in oblique intention as the correlate of
the intentional acts of consciousness. The transition from the natural attitude to
the phenomenological attitude requires the phenomenological or transcendental15
phenomenological reduction. The reduction “brackets,” i.e., it abstracts from the
givenness of the world in direct intention of the natural attitude, but it has the objects
and the world precisely in the way in which they exist as the correlates of intentional
acts in oblique intention.
Phenomenological descriptions in oblique intention are interested in the analysis
of the general structures of consciousness, not the individual self-experiences of
the subjective consciousness of the phenomenologist. Consciousness is given to
itself in phenomenological reflection as the structure of ego-centered intentional
acts together with their correlates, the intentional objects, and its temporal horizons
in inner time-consciousness. It is, hence, necessary for phenomenological investiga-
tions to give a phenomenological justification for the intentional acts and methodical
steps of the intuition of essences. The development from phenomenology as descrip-
tive psychology to a pure phenomenology as phenomenological epistemology has
caused some difficulties for the understanding of the status of justification.
Carl Stumpf already recognized the problems of the cognition of ideal objects in
his eidology and offered solutions in the framework of his descriptive psychology.
Husserl offered a widely accepted justification for the method of eidetic intuition,
but he still characterized phenomenology as descriptive psychology in the first
edition of the LI. He rejected this interpretation later in Ideas I, and in the
introduction to the second edition of the LI. The earlier understanding of the
nature of phenomenology in the LI is misleading because (1) the attempt to find a
justification of ideal objects in a phenomenology as descriptive psychology ends in
the paradoxes of psychologism and (2) the step from phenomenology as descriptive
psychology to pure phenomenology changes the understanding of the nature of
phenomenological investigations, but does not imply any changes in the descriptive
analyses on the level of the rejected earlier understanding of phenomenology.
A second problem is that the structure and some passages of Ideas I can
easily be misunderstood. Together with the problem just mentioned above, this
problem has caused the misleading assumption that the intuition of essences
and the phenomenological reduction are two independent methodological pillars
of phenomenological research. Ideas I treated the problem of the intuition of
essences in the first part before introducing the phenomenological reduction. The

15
The Kantian version of “transcendental” implies the hypothetical construction of the unity of
transcendental apperception indicated by the “I think” as the highest condition of the possibility of
experience that is itself not given in experience, i.e., not a phenomenon. To use “transcendental” in
this sense as an adjective for phenomenology is, hence, a flat contradiction.
16 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

fourth chapter of the second part about special reductions that are included in the
phenomenological reduction explicitly brackets the material eidetic disciplines and
pure logic as mathesis universalis.
However, it is not too difficult to refute this thesis in the context of the Ideas.
It is obvious that the cognition of essences of objects given in direct intention is
in brackets under the phenomenological reduction. But this does not mean that the
description of consciousness, of intentional acts and their intentional objects is a
description of an empirical history of subjective experiences. It is a description of
the material essences, the essential structures of consciousness.
A further basic methodical distinction for the analysis of the intuition of essences
is the distinction between formal and material essences. The essential structures of
consciousness are material essences. The methodology of the intuition of material
essences presupposes the methodical explication of the formal essences of formal
ontology and pure logical grammar. The phenomenological reduction brackets
mathematical theories, and even the theory of the structures of logical deductions,
but not the formal structures of objects in general, Gegenstände überhaupt.16 The
task of formal ontology and its correlate, pure logical grammar, is the phenomeno-
logical analysis of this structure as a mathesis universalis. The methods applied in
formal ontology and pure logical grammar that are of significance for the analysis
of the intentional acts in which material essences are given will be considered in
Sect. 2.2. The task of Sect. 2.3 is then the analysis of the intuition of material
morphological and exact essences.

2.2 Wholes and Parts, Formal Ontology, and the Idea

of a Mathesis Universalis

A preliminary assessment of the basic significance of the theory of the whole and
the parts for a phenomenological epistemology presupposes a correct assessment
of the significance of the theory for the phenomenology of logic. The first version
of the theory of the whole and the parts was published in the Logical Investigation
II. What is said there about logic, more precisely about pure logical grammar or
apophantic logic17 presupposes the first steps in the development of the theory of
the whole and the parts and is itself the presupposition for the further development
of the theory. Pure logical grammar is the theory of apophantic forms of complex
independent unified wholes of meaning, Bedeutungskomplexionen. Apophantic
forms are also called categorial forms or, in short, categories.18 Categorial forms

16
Hua III, §59.
17
The term “apophantic” is derived from Greek apophansis, the technical term for judgment, more
precisely for what is meant by judgment in the Aristotelian tradition.
18
This use of the term “category” is much broader than the Kantian understanding of categories as
forms of functions in judgments.
2.2 Wholes and Parts, Formal Ontology, and the Idea of a Mathesis Universalis 17

are structural wholes with parts that are the categorial matter and the forms of these
wholes are determined by syntcategorematic parts, the connectives including the
copula. Categorial forms are given in categorical intuition and categorial intuition
presupposes formalizing abstraction. Formalizing abstraction requires variations in
imagination in which the syncategorematic parts are fixed and the categorial matters
are varied.19 Formalizing abstraction and categorial intuition can also be applied to
noemata, intentional objects in general of a formal ontology as the correlate of a
formal apophantics.20
Husserl himself emphasized the significance of the theory of the whole and the
parts for the further development of his phenomenological research in a remark at
the end of the preface to the second edition of the Logical Investigations. Seen from
the viewpoint of the development of pure phenomenology in Ideas I, what he had in
mind is the development of the theory of the material ontologies that determine the
material categories of the objects of a material region. The method of imaginative
variations that is necessary for the clarification of material essences is relevant for
this theory and presupposes the formal structures of the formal ontological region
as methodical guidelines for variations. A detailed account of the relation between
formal and material essences and their constitution in imaginative variations will be
given in the next section.21
Thirty years after the Logical Invetigations another version of the theory in
Husserl’s manuscripts was published by Landgrebe in Experience and Judgment.22
Experience and Judgment added the theory of collections, sets, and units, or in
short, what is usually called set theory. The problem whether this theory can be
understood as a special case or an independent extension of the theory of the
whole and the parts will be considered later in part III. According to Formal and
Transcendental Logic and already before in Ideas I, pure formal logic includes,
beyond pure formal grammar, the theory of definite manifolds, i.e., axiomatic
systems that are closed under the principle of non-contradiction. Hilbert’s general
normative meta-mathematical theory of axiom systems is, according to Husserl, a
realization of his idea of a mathesis universalis on the level of a pure formalism.23

19
According to a phenomenology of logic variables in formalized languages refer to contents that
can be varied and constants that refer to the syncategorematic parts of well formed expression.
20
A summary of Hua IXX/1 LI II, Investigation III, §§23, 24, and Investigation IV can be found
in Hua III, esp. §10–15. See also Hua VII, FTL Appendix I (Beilage I: Syntaktische Formen und
syntaktische Stoffe). Cf. Seebohm 1990 on categorical intuition. Husserl’s phenomenology of logic
and formal ontology presupposes, according to the interpretation of Jacob Klein, an “Aristotelian
theory of abstraction.” Cf. Hopkins 2011, 525f. The problems with this interpretation is that
Husserl’s references to Hilbert and other contemporaries are neglected, cf. below Sect. 7.2.
21
Hua III, §16.
22
Husserl 1972, esp. §§29–32.
23
Hua III, §72, Hua XVII, §31; The problems connected with the relation of the principle of non-
contradiction and the principle of completeness in Goedel’s proof that appeared after the FTL could
not be mentioned in the FTL and has not been mentioned later in Husserl’s writings. Cf. Sect. 7.2
below.
18 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

A mathesis universalis is, hence, a meta-mathematical theory and not mathematics.

A phenomenological epistemology requires more, first of all the theory of exact
material essences.24
More will be said about mathesis universalis in Part III, Sect. 8.3. The Fourth
Logical Investigation offers in addition material examples for the application of
the theory to the phenomenological analysis of the structure of objects of sensory
experience.25 Experience and Judgment offers a corroborated phenomenological
analysis of the application of the theory to the structures of sensual experience on
the level of passive synthesis. This application justifies the claim that the categories
of formal ontology are applicable to all regions of material ontology. The theory is,
therefore, of basic significance for the method of phenomenological descriptions in
general. Husserl mentioned in the second volume of the Logical Investigations26 that
a formalized axiomatic mathematical account of formal theory is desirable, but is
not a presupposition for its application to phenomenological descriptions. Adequate
accounts of formalized axiomatic theories of the whole and the parts, often called
mereologies, and of phenomenological semantics have been published in the last
decades of the last and in the beginning of the present century.27
A whole is a sum total (Inbegriff ) of contents that are all covered by a single
unifying (einheitliche) foundation. A whole is an independent whole if it is given
without the aid of further contents, or, in terms of Experience and Judgment, because
it can be given as the same in the context of a changing background. The contents of
such a totality are called parts. The unity (Einheitlichkeit) of the foundation means
that all contents are either immediately or mediately connected by foundations with
every other content.28 The contents mentioned in these definitions are the parts of
the whole. Two types of parts can be distinguished, independent and dependent
contents. “Piece” is another term used for independent parts. “Dependent moment,”
sometimes also “abstract moment,29” are other terms for dependent parts.
A precise definition of “piece” and “moment” presupposes distinctions between
different types of foundations. Foundations connecting parts have formal properties.
They can be one-sided, reciprocal, and concatenations of one-sided or reciprocal.30

24
Cf. the next section on exact essences, and on mathematics see Sects. 7.1, 7.2 in Part III.
25
Hua XIX/1, Investigation IV, §13.
26
Hua XIX/1, Investigation III, §§22–25.
27
E.g., Null 1983; Smith 1982; Fine 1995; Wiegand 1998, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2007.
28
The chosen translations of the German terms here in Investigation III, §21 are different from the
terms chosen in Findlay’s translation vol. II.
29
The term “abstract moment” means that the moment cannot be given by itself. It can only be
given as an abstract property, e.g., red, of an independent whole. It can be considered by itself only
with the aid of an isolating abstraction bracketing the whole in which it is given.
30
These formal properties of foundations seem to be counterparts of some formal properties of
relations, namely of asymmetrical, symmetrical, transitive, and intransitive relations. There are,
nevertheless, essential differences between foundations and relations. More will be said ar the end
of this section.
2.2 Wholes and Parts, Formal Ontology, and the Idea of a Mathesis Universalis 19

Moments can only be given in foundations connecting them with other moments.
Clusters of moments connected by foundations are pieces only if the cluster includes
an abstract moment of the genus extension and displays more or less sharp contrast
phenomena in at least one of the other genera of moments in the cluster.31 Pieces
as parts of a whole are relatively independent parts only because they can be
phenomena distinguished by contrast, and they belong immediately to the concrete
whole as a totality of contents related to each other in a structured system of
foundations. Such systems include the contrast phenomena between the moments of
the structure that do not belong to the genus extension.32 The unifying foundation
covering all parts of the whole mentioned above is, hence, a structured system of
foundations between the parts.33
What has been said about wholes, parts, pieces, moments, and types of founda-
tions in the Logical Investigations and in Experience and Judgment is sufficient
for the analysis of independent wholes and their parts, e.g., for the analysis of
the hyletic correlates of passive synthesis in primordial sensual experience. But in
natural languages the terms “whole” and “part” often refer in many cases to other,
more complex types of wholes and their parts. A solar system can be called a whole
with the sun and the planets as its parts. Organisms are called organic wholes and
their parts are called their organs. Social communities, (e.g., a family or a state)
are called wholes and their parts are their members. Furthermore, what has been
said in the Logical Investigations about the wholes of pure logical grammar is
sufficient for the analysis of logical propositions and, as mentioned, of sentences
in natural languages. But it is also possible to call a consistent and complete formal
axiom system or a rule system of natural deduction a whole. The second canon of
hermeneutics, the art of the interpretation of texts, has been called the canon of the
whole and the parts.34
The independent wholes and their parts discussed in Logical Investigations and
in Experience and Judgment can be called first-order wholes. They are wholes of
the first-order, because their parts are not themselves independent wholes. The parts
of the complex wholes mentioned in the examples are, however, themselves already
independent wholes. Such complex wholes can be called wholes of a higher order.
The parts of such wholes can be first-order wholes, but they can also be wholes with
parts that are themselves already independent wholes, e.g., the parts, members of a
family as a whole are themselves as living organism wholes of a higher order.

31
A material example is, e.g., seeing the more or less sharp contrast between a red spot and its blue
background in their spatial extensions.
32
Such foundations within extensions appear as relations in the context of pure logical grammar
and in the grammar of natural languages, e.g., above, below, later, earlier.
33
Husserl used the term “unifying foundation,” but this term can be misleading. The parts are not
one-sidedly founded in the whole. The givenness of a whole of the parts means, in the proposed
interpretation, that they are unified in the whole by a system of relations.
34
Cf. Seebohm 2004, §§25ff. It is obvious that some of the types of wholes just mentioned must
be of central interest for the epistemology of the social and the historical human sciences.
20 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

Neither the Logical Investigations nor Experience and Judgment offer a formal
account of the structure of wholes of higher order but Experience and Judgment
mentions that the relations and properties of relations are constitutive categories
for the structures of collections of first-order wholes given together in a common
background. Such collections of related wholes are categorial objects of a higher
order. The question is whether some types of such categorial objects can have formal
ontological structures that can count as the formal structures of the wholes of a
higher order mentioned above.35 No explicit answer to this question can be found
in Experience and Judgment but it can be shown that a positive answer and with it
a formal ontological definition for wholes of higher order, is compatible with the
context of Experience and Judgment.
Structures of collections of objects determined by relations are intentional objects
of active synthesis. The wholes of the first-order with parts that are held together by
unifying foundations are phenomena given in the hyletic field. As such they are
given for passive synthesis, and can be given in addition as intentional objects only
if contrast phenomena in the hyletic field trigger a response of active intentional
consciousness. After this response, they are pre-given as potential intentional
objects of active synthesis on the level of a pre-predicative but nevertheless already
categorially formed sensual experience in secondary passivity.
The presupposition for formal ontological theories is a formalizing abstraction.
Given formalizing abstraction all the material aspects of phenomenological analysis
in Experience and Judgment just summarized are in brackets. They are not relevant
for the residuum of the abstractive reduction, a general formal ontological theory of
wholes and their parts. This general formal theory is not restricted to wholes with
parts that belong to the whole sinpy because they are parts of a unifying system of
foundations. The question is whether such a theory can admit additional categorical
structures for wholes with parts that are already themselves wholes connected by
unifying systems of relations.
Going beyond Experience and Judgment it can be said that the differences
between collections as categorial forms of a higher order are determined by
structured systems of relations. It is, hence, possible to distinguish between more or
less open systems and (b) closed systems. The latter case can serve as definiens in
a definition for wholes of higher order and their parts: Wholes of higher order have
parts that are themselves independent wholes and all these parts are connected with
all other parts in a unifying closed system of relations. This definition needs several
comments (1) about the wholes of a higher order with parts that are themselves
independent wholes and (2) about the unifying system of relations of such wholes.
(1.a) The parts of wholes of the first order are dependent or only relatively
independent parts. The parts of wholes of a higher order are independent
wholes. The parts of wholes belonging to the lowest level of the wholes of
higher order are independent wholes of the first order. But the parts of wholes

35
For instance Husserl 1972, §§33, 34.
2.2 Wholes and Parts, Formal Ontology, and the Idea of a Mathesis Universalis 21

of higher order can be taken by themselves as already independent wholes of

a higher order. Wholes of a higher order always belong to one element of a
series of well ordered levels of a higher order, i.e., a higher order whole of
level n with parts that belong, as wholes, to level n  1 can be itself a part of
a higher order whole on level n C 1.
(1.b) Two types of independent wholes of higher order n  1 that are given as parts
of an independent whole of level n can be distinguished: the first type of
independent higher order wholes of level n  1 belonging to wholes of higher
order n are able to belong to more than one whole of level n36 ; independent
wholes of order n  1 as parts of the second type can only exist as parts of one
and only one independent whole of order n.37
(2.a) The demarcation criterion in the distinction between the unifying system of
parts in wholes of the first order and in the wholes of higher order is the
difference between foundations and relations. Foundations share some of
the formal properties of relations, but foundations are “relations” between
dependent moments that can not be given only in the context with other
moments and between pieces as relative independent parts of wholes, pieces
are collections of dependent moments with at least one dependent moment of
the genus extension, and they are one-sidedly founded in contrast phenomena
of the qualitative moments in the collection of dependent moments separating
them from the background. Pieces as relatively independent parts of wholes
can be distinguished from other pieces in a whole or a collection of pieces
only because they are all together one-sidedly founded in a unifying structured
system of contrast phenomena. The unifying structural system of a whole of
the first order is, therefore, a system of foundations. Relations are more than
simple n-adic predicates referring to two or more objects or individuals. N-
adic predicates in natural38 and in formal languages usually refer to relations,
but they can also refer to relatively independent pieces in unifying system of
foundations in wholes of the first order. Relations between individual objects

36
Members of social wholes are perfect material instances of this formal type. A child of parents
in a family can be at the same time a student of a university, a soldier in an army etc. According to
the standard terminology of the social sciences members of social wholes can have different social
functions or roles in more than one social whole but also in open systems of social collections of
individuals.
37
With a grain of salt. it could be said that the organs of an organism are also perfect material
instances of such parts. The grain of salt is given, e.g., with materially possible surgical
transplantations of organs or parts of organs. The restriction in this material instance of the formal
structure of the second type is that they cannot function at the same time in two different organisms.
Unfortunately, the term “organic whole” is often used as a metaphor for wholes of a higher order
that are by no means covered by the formal definition given for the second type.
38
The problem of natural languages is that they have many grammatically different expressions
that can refer to relations, namely verbs, nouns, adjectives and their inflexions, and particles. This
list is not complete. What can be added is that such systems are different in, e.g., Indo-European,
Finno-Ugrian and language families in East Asia. Research in this field would be interesting as a
link between formal and historical linguistics.
22 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

in the formal ontological theory of categorial structures of collections and

wholes of higher order and their parts are relations between independent
wholes.
Relations have formal and material properties. Their material properties
are one-sidedly founded in certain material properties that are dependent
moments of the related independent wholes. Such properties can be re-
presented on the formal level by second-order predicates. Foundations have
formal properties, but beyond that no further material properties. They
“relate” dependent moments and cannot bear within themselves any further
dependent moments. They are foundations and nothing else beyond that. The
unifying function for the parts in wholes of a higher order are structural
systems of relations, their formal and material properties, and the material
properties, moments, and pieces that are required as one-sided foundations
for the relations between the parts of wholes of a higher order.
It is, furthermore, possible that a structural system of a whole of higher
order n is grafted upon and one-sidedly founded in the structural system of
relations of a whole of higher order n  1. A structural system n  1 is more
or less modified by the structural system of wholes of order n. The system
of order n can be restricted to the parts of the whole n  1 but it can be and
in most material cases is grafted on additional other wholes or collections of
independent wholes of order n  1.
(2.b) Two different types of higher order wholes and their parts have been
distinguished in (1.b). According to what has been said in the end of (2.a)
a third type can be mentioned. A whole of a higher order of the third type
can itself be the foundation of a superstructure that adds additional modifying
properties of relations between the parts and requires additional modifying
properties for the related parts.39 A caveat must be added. The given definition
of wholes of higher order is a definition of an ideal case. The comments on
the cases mentioned above indicate that such wholes are not closed in the
strict sense because parts of such wholes can also be parts of other wholes,
etc. It is, furthermore, often difficult in concrete cases to decide whether all
the independent wholes of order n that are parts of a whole of the higher
order n C 1 are really immediately or mediately connected by relations with
all other parts. In short, it difficult to decide in concrete cases whether the
concrete whole in question is a closed system of independent wholes in the

39
The structured unifying systems of unicellular organisms can exist by themselves, but additional
structured systems of the relations of cells in higher organisms can be grafted upon the unifying
system of relations in unicellular organisms. The basic social-biological system of family relations
can be the substrate first of additional customary relations and then beyond that even of legal
relations.
2.2 Wholes and Parts, Formal Ontology, and the Idea of a Mathesis Universalis 23

strict sense of the definition or an almost closed collection of independent

wholes of the higher order n C 1.40
It is possible that further fundamental ontological and logical investigations can
discover additional formal types of wholes of a higher order. But the given list is
almost sufficient for the investigations of part II. What is missing is only an analysis
of the formal structure of “genetic foundation” and “generative foundation.” Husserl
introduced the distinction between static and genetic phenomenology after the
publication of Ideas I between 1917 and 1921, and the distinction between genetic
and generative phenomenology more than 10 years later in the wake of his Cartesian
Meditations. The first task of genetic and generative phenomenology is to discover
the genetic or generative foundation of unifying eidetic structures of collections of
objects or wholes of the first and higher orders in genetically or generatively prior
unifying structures of collections or wholes of the first and higher orders.
Genetic or generative foundations have, with more than one grain of salt, a
certain similarity with Aristotelian formal causes. The material unifying structures
of wholes and collections are the phenomenological counterparts of Aristotelian
essences. The material formal causes can be compared with genetic and generative
foundations. But the phenomenology of time-consciousness provides in addition an
account of the formal categorial structure of genetic and generative foundations.
This account presupposes the phenomenological analysis of the material and the
formal structures of subjective and intersubjective time-consciousness. Genetic
constitution is usually understood as the counterpart of subjective static primordial
passive and active constitution. Generative constitution is understood as the counter-
part of static intersubjective constitution in Husserl’s writings and in the literature.41
Husserl’s own analyses of primordial genetic constitution are first of all inter-
ested in the structures of the passive constitution of perception, association, and
habits, the genesis of subjective consciousness. His generative phenomenological
analyses are interested in structures belonging to cultural anthropology,42 e.g., the
distinctions between normality and abnormality, homeworld and alienworld, etc.
Generative phenomenology is understood as the counterpart of subjective genetic
constitution. If, however, generative constitution is understood as the intersubjective
counterpart of the genesis of subjective passive and active constitution, they need a
common denominator. The common denominator is that both presuppose temporal

40
Cases in which almost closed connections are called “wholes” occur very often in the human
sciences. Given the complexity of their subject matter, it will be in most cases impossible, but also
often irrelevant, to ask for a final decision.
41
Cf. Sects. 2.3 and 3.2 below for a more detailed explication of the difference of “genesis” and
“generation.” Cf. also Steinbock 1997 and Welton 1997.
42
Husserl also often used the term “ethnology.” How to distinguish between such a phenomeno-
logical ethnology and ethnology as an empirical human science is a question that causes additional
problems. Without further comments the distinction, e.g., of homeworld and alienworld could be
understood as a distinction belonging to Alfred Schutz’s static phenomenology of the social world
or, in Husserl’s terms, to the static phenomenology of the lifeworld.
24 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

structures, and with them the problem of the constitution of inner subjective time
consciousness and of the intersubjective experience of time as a shared objective
transcendent time. It is, hence, sufficient for the analysis of the formal structure of
genetic and of generative foundation to analyze the formal structure of this common
denominator.
The structure of the temporality of inner time-consciousness is the pre-given
formal structure for all levels of experiencing consciousness. Both the horizon of
protention (primordial expectation) and the horizon of the continuum of retentions,
together with their hyletic contents, are one-sidedly founded in the actual Now. The
actual Now and its structure stands; it is the nunc stans. What emerges in the actual
Now and its protentional horizon and then flows off in the continuum of retention
includes the hyletic contents.
The pre-given structure of inner time-consciousness is the foundation for the
structure of the temporality of active intentional synthesis. The horizon of passive
protention is the foundation for the horizon of active expectations on the level
of active intentional synthesis. The material content of expectations is originally
determined by passive associations between presently given contents and contents
hidden in the continuum of retentions.
The dimension of retentions of passive inner time-consciousness is on the level
of active intentionality the horizon of the past, the horizon for the intentional acts
of memory and reproduction. The intentional objects of memories are clusters of
past states of affairs. To remember this or that aspect of such a cluster, e.g., the
neighborhood in a town, means to recall several features without representing a
sequence of events in past time phases. Memories provide the material for reproduc-
tions of a past period of my inner lived experiences and their objects. Reproductions
refer to contents of memory, but they add the distinct representation of the
temporal sequence of the contents as temporal sequences of events. Intersubjective
time consciousness is one-sidedly founded in subjective inner time-consciousness.
Intersubjective time is in addition consciousness of shared intersubjective time and,
as such, the consciousness of the shared objective time of shared transcendent
objects.
Two further questions emerge with this: the question of the how of the givenness
of Others in my own subjective experience and that of the analysis of the specific
structures of the shared horizon of the future and the shared horizon of the past in
intersubjectively given transcendent temporality. These questions will be considered
in the next chapter. A genesis or a generation is a temporal development of
material states of affairs. Such a development given as an intentional object is
a sequence of events that happened in the past. It is, therefore, an object given
first in the subjective reproduction of past events and then in the reconstruction of
“what was really the case” in intersubjective investigations. The difference between
subjective reproductions and intersubjective reconstructions of past events is a
material difference. The difference is essential and will be considered in Sect. 3.1
in the next chapter. Of interest in the present section is only the formal structure of
reproduced or reconstructed temporal sequences.
2.3 Essences and Eidetic Intuition 25

Formal ontological investigations presuppose formalising abstraction. All mate-

rial differences of the material essences of objects are in brackets for this abstraction.
Thus the material differences between subjective reproductions and intersubjective
reconstructions and their intentional objects are not of significance for the formal
analysis of the temporal structure of the sequence of past events. Genetic and gener-
ative foundations both presuppose the formal structure of sequences of reproduced
time phases: a time phase n is the immediate successor of its predecessor, the time
phase n  1. The time phase n  1 is, hence, the one-sided foundation of the time
phase n.
What has to be added for the definition of “temporal (genetic or generative)
foundation” is only what has been said above about collections and wholes of higher
order n and their parts, the wholes of higher order n  1: The unifying categorial
structure of a whole of higher order n – the two types 1 and 2 mentioned above in
(1.b) and the third type mentioned in (2.b) – is temporally founded in its parts, the
wholes, or (type 3) the whole, and their unifying categorial structure of higher order
n  1 if and only if the wholes of higher order n  1 are given in a time phase n  1
and the whole of higher order n is given in the time phase n.
Two remarks must be added: (1) The term “foundation” is prima facie used in
this definition as a “relation” not between dependent moments, but between wholes
and their unifying structures. What is really meant is, however, the application of
the temporal foundation of a formal state of affairs in the formal time phases n and
n  1. Time phases considered by themselves are dependent moments within the
dependent moment temporal extension, and this extension has the formal structure
of a well-ordered set of immediate successors and predecessors. (2) Seen from the
viewpoint of formal logic, one sided foundations are replicative conditionals.43 The
necessary condition of the replicative conditional in the case of a foundation is not
merely that the foundation is the consequent of a generalized conditional that has
not yet been empirically falsified and is, in this sense, empirically true. A foundation
is an essentially necessary condition. If there is a red object, then this object is
necessarily a visually extended object.

2.3 Essences and Eidetic Intuition

The method of eidetic intuition was for many readers of the Logical Investigations
and Ideas I in the first half of the last century the conditio sine qua non of a
pure phenomenology and phenomenological philosophy. The question is, of course,
what the methodological justification for this new method is. Apart from the empty

43
Implicative conditionals refer to sufficient conditions that admit predictions presupposing
positing the antecedens in the second premise of a modus ponens. Replicative conditionals refer to
necessary conditions that admit retrodictions in a modified modus ponens in which the consequent
is assumed in the second premise.
26 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

assertion that some people have the gift of eidetic intuition and others do not that
was the usual answer of the members of the Göttingen School was:
1. Essences can be discovered in free fantasy variation, and
2. Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the givenness of formal ontological
and logical ideal objects had once and for all cleared the ground for further
phenomenological discoveries of all kinds of material essences.
Without denying the merits of the Göttingen School, it can be said with hindsight
that this understanding of the Logical Investigations and the first part of Ideas I was
not guided by a precise understanding of the intentions of the author. Considering
(2), Husserl’s main intention was to use his analyses of the formal ontological and
logico-grammatical categories as the groundwork for a future phenomenological
epistemology of all sciences and their methodologies.44 But this tacitely implies
that the investigation of formal ideal objects has a methodological priority for the
eidetic intuition of material ideal objects.
A remark about a possible “worldly” theory of the a priori and the method of
eidetic intuition, e.g., in geometry but also a formal ontology must be added. In the
Logical Investigations Husserl ceitized Kantian, Neo-Kantian, and other theories
as a psychologism that fails to recognize the character of the a priori as a realm
of ideal objects.45 Phenomenologists in the Göttingen tradition, but also some in
the later Freiburg tradition, rejected the transcendental-phenomenological reduction,
but insisted on the possibility of an “eidetic reduction” recognizing the objective
character of the a priori. However, the controversies in the Freiburg tradition and
later in the tradition of the New School, e.g., between Schutz and Gurwitsch, have
a much more complex background and can only be considered in the context of
the questions that will be discussed in the next section. But from what has been
said in the first section about Husserl’s turn from descriptive psychology in the
first edition of the Logical Investigations to pure or transcendental phenomenology
in the second edition and Ideas I it follows that a theory of eidetic intuition for
a phenomenological theory of knowledge is not possible as a “worldly” theory
in the natural attitude. Such a theory would necessarily end up in empirical or
transcendental psychologism or some other kind of relativism. For Husserl even
Kant’s account of the a priori was still a transcendental psychologism.46 Of course,
this does not mean that eidetic intuition recognizing a priori structures is impossible
in the natural attitude. It also does not mean that worldly theories of eidetic intuition
and ideal objects are impossible. They are possible, but given what has to be said
about the paradox of subjectivity in the next section, they will necessarily end up in
the pitfalls of relativism.

44
Hua XIX, 2, LI, 2nd ed. Introduction §7.
45
Hua XIX 1, §38.
46
For a comprehensive account of different types of transcendental psychologism in Husserl see
Seebohm 1962, §§3 and 28.
2.3 Essences and Eidetic Intuition 27

The problem of the static and genetic structures of the intentional acts in which
essences are given can be postponed. An analysis of the different types of essences
and their givenness reveals already against (1) that more is required that just free
fantasy variations for the intuition of essences. A classification of essences and laws
of essence can distinguish between the following:

A formal essences B material essences

/ \
B.a essences of dependent parts B.b essences of dependent wholes
/ \
B.b.1 foundations B.b.2 exact essences
between dependent
parts

Formal essences are of the categories and the laws governing categorial structures
of formal ontology and pure logical grammar. Categorial structures are more or
less complex combinations of related categories. The relations between categories
in categorial structures are foundations. The analysis of categorial structures is
first of all interested in the laws of foundations. The givenness of formal essences
presupposes formalizing abstraction. A minimum of material content is left even
on the highest levels of generalizing abstraction. Formalizing abstraction abstracts
not only from the contents of all empirical material concepts. but also from all
contents given in the eidetic intuition of material morphological essences (B). Only
formal categories and categorial structures are possible objects after the formalizing
abstraction. Formalizing abstraction implies vice versa that the categories and
categorial functions admit the possible variation of material contents belonging to
one and only one certain type of categories or categorial structures. To vary material
contents that do not belong to these types is impossible.
A caveat must be added. The modal particles “impossibility, possibility, neces-
sity” ought not to be understood as the logical possibility, impossibility, and
necessity of deductive logic. A conjunction of contradictory statements is, for
instance, a logical impossibility for deductive logic. Impossibility on the level
of pure logical grammar indicates grammatical nonsense in a complex cluster
of meanings (Bedeutungszusammenhang). Statements or other complex meaning
structures are impossible in this sense if they violate the possible categorial
structures of complex meaning structures. Logical impossibility on the level of
well-formed sentences refers to conjunctions of contradictory statements. For pure
logical grammar contradiction is a well-formed formula and not nonsense.
The second easy case is the case of the material categories of dependent parts
and the material laws of the foundation relations between them (B.b.1). What is of
interest is the specific character of (1) the essence of specific material dependent
parts or moments and (2) the laws governing the foundations between them.
28 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

1. Dependent parts are the attributes of substrates, i.e., of independent wholes.

Considered by themselves, they are also called abstract parts or moments.
Species of abstract moments like red or a specific shape given in a spatial
extension are abstract moments belonging to a genus of abstract moments, e.g.,
visual quality or visual extension. They are always first given as dependent parts
or attributes of concrete substrates. To consider them by themselves in a second
step requires an isolating abstraction, i.e., the abstraction from the concrete
substrate in which they are given. This abstraction is sufficient for the cognition
of the essence of an abstract moment. It is, for instance, sufficient to have one
impression of a specific red as an attribute of one concrete object to discover the
essence of this red after the isolating abstraction. This essence can now be fixed
and can be discovered again as the same red in a variety of other substrates. It
does not matter whether such a variation is determined by concrete experiences
or free fantasy variations. The advantage of free fantasy variation is, however,
that it immediately demonstrates the independence of the essence “red” as an
ideal and not as a real object.
2. The immediate condition of the givenness of red and in general of visual
qualities requires its givenness together with another dependent part, some spatial
extension. The formal ontological technical term for this condition is foundation.
“Red has its one-sided foundation in a spatial extension” means that the shape
of the visual space can be varied without modifying the red. But it can also
be said vice versa that a certain shape of visual extension can be identified as
the same if and only if the contrast phenomena separating it from its spatial
background can be represented as identically the same in a free variation of the
visual representations of the contrast of at least two visual qualities. A specific
shaped piece of visual space has its one-sided foundation in contrast phenomena
between two different species of the genus visual quality.
Exact essences (B.b.2) are originally given in concrete substrates with a depen-
dent moment of the genus extension. The exact essence, e.g., of a straight line, is,
according to its definition, the shortest connection between two points. The defini-
tion indicates that the fantasy variation is in this case by no means free. It guided
by a strict rule for a goal-directed linear progress toward an ideal limit. Together
with the meta-mathematical formal ontological theory of colligations or sets and
units, the theory of exact essences is of central significance for the reflections on the
methodology of mathematics in a phenomenological epistemology.47
The incomplete sketch of the intuition of essences of abstract material moments
(B.b.1) already indicates that the simple reference to free variation is insufficient.
The intuition requires first of all the act of isolating the abstract moment in a
pre-given concrete substrate, i.e., a category of formal ontology (A). The eidetic
intuition of clusters of two or more material abstract moments presupposes in
addition a formal ontological categorial structure of foundation. Variations of

47
See above the remarks in the beginning of Sects. 2.3, 8.1, and 8.2 in Part III on mathematics.
2.3 Essences and Eidetic Intuition 29

representations accordingly require that one well-defined formal ontological aspect

of the representation of an object is fixed and the other is varied.
The case of exact essences (B.b.2) presupposes from the outset the formal
ontological distinction between “substrate” and “dependent part.” It is also obvious
that each step in a uniform progression towards an ideal limit has its foundation in
one and only one preceding step and is itself the foundation for one and only one
succeeding step in the progress. More can be said in a formalized logic of relations
about the categorial form of the relations between units in a linear progress of this
type, but what has been said is sufficient to indicate again that the variations in
imagination are in this case not free. They are governed by strict rules defined in
terms of formal ontological categorial structures.
Case (B.a), the intuition of essences of independent wholes, the substances or
substrates of traditional philosophy, is the difficult case. The preceding consider-
ations of cases (B.b.1) and (B.b.2) have shown that variations in imagination are
necessary but also that they are free only within the limits of certain rules. The
rules governing the variations of eidetic intuitions are applications of the formal
ontological laws for categorial structures of dependent parts of independent wholes.
It is, therefore, plausible to assume that the application of the laws for categorial
structures of substrates qua independent wholes and for the relations between them
is a necessary requirement for the eidetic analysis of the structures of concrete
wholes.
Empirical concepts used for the recognition of individuals belonging to the
same species are already complex. Assuming that all attempts to discover the
essence of independent substrates starts with a pre-given concept of the substrates,
the first step is to find some heuristic strategies for beginning with the analysis
of concrete wholes. The discovery and justification of such strategies requires
more than a preliminary survey of the system of different types of essences and
their interdependencies. What is required is now the postponed phenomenological
analysis of the intentional acts in which essences are given.
One of the misleading assumptions of early readers of the first volume of the
Logical Investigations and even of the first part of Ideas I 48 was the strict separation
between the cognition of ideal objects in a quasi-Platonic intuition and the cognition
of real objects in sensory experience and empirical conceptualization. An additional
second assumption is immediately implied in this misunderstanding, the assump-
tion that the theory of eidetic intuition and the theory of the phenomenological
reduction are two independent methodological principles of phenomenology. But
a problematic situation that triggered the invention of a theory is by no means
an epistemological justification for this theory. The problem of the cognition
of ideal objects induced the transition to pure phenomenology. However, the

48
Cf. the first part of Ideas I: Wesen und Wesenserkenntnis i.e., “Essences and the Cognition of
Essences” (my translation). The misleading impression is that this part can be understood as an
explication of methodical principles that can be given before and outside the phenomenological
reduction.
30 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

epistemological justification of the cognition of essences is a task of phenomenology

itself, phenomenology understood in the beginning as descriptive psychology in the
first edition of the Logical Investigations and then as pure phenomenology after the
phenomenological reduction in Ideas I.
The examples in the analyses of formal ontological structures in the Logical
Investigations already refer to the objects of sensory experience. The analyses of
the intentional acts in which the formal and then the material essences and laws
of essence are given in part I of Ideas I presuppose the structures of inner time-
consciousness discussed in §81 there. The lectures on inner time-consciousness
are also presupposed in later analyses of the hyletic field, passive synthesis and
association, and the pre-predicative origin of the formal ontological and logico-
grammatical categorial structures in the Experience and Judgment. Following
Experience and Judgment it can be said that the basic pre-predicative categorial
structures of formal ontology are already present on the level of the apperception of
the material of passive synthesis in intentional acts of pure sensory experience. The
pre-predicative formal ontological categorial structures of sensory experience deter-
mine the predicative structures of pure logical grammar. The categorial structures of
pure logical grammar determine the predicative structures of meaning and complex
clusters of meanings. Pure logical grammar is, therefore, the a priori framework for
material empirical concepts and predications on the level of wholes and parts of the
first order.
It has already been mentioned at the beginning of the last section that categorial
intuition, formal essences, and with them formalizing abstraction are the methodical
presupposition for the discovery of material morphological and exact essences in
eidetic variations. They provide the framework for methodically guided fantasy
variations. Given this as the first premise and then the brief summary of the
phenomenological analyses of Experience and Judgment as the second it follows
that eidetic intuition is independent from and even opposed to empirical concept
formation must be rejected. A phenomenological analysis of the intentional acts in
which material essences are given must first presuppose the genesis of empirical
predication and concept formation.
When Adam named the animals, he must have been able to recognize a lion
and to distinguish the lion from the elephant strolling by behind the lion. The
ability to recognize sensual empirical objects is the presupposition for giving names
regardless of whether they are names of individuals or a species of individuals
of concrete objects, but also of dependent abstract moments. The problem of
sensual universals, prima facie a contradictio in adjectio, was already a problem for
traditional philosophy. According to Kant images are always images of individual
objects. Sensible universals are schemata, pre-conscious rules for recognizing
sensible representations that are covered by the scheme, e.g., rules of the scheme
that is presupposed by and then connected with the name of a species, e.g., “dog.”
A scheme is a set of rules determining the production of a series of different images
or the ability to subsume a given image under the scheme. Transcendental reflection
can discover that the formal framework of the categorical structure of understanding
of possible objects is also the formal framework for the rules guiding the power of
imagination.
2.3 Essences and Eidetic Intuition 31

The material structure of schemata is, however, always a product of an art of

the power of imagination that is hidden in the depth of our souls.49 Seen from the
viewpoint of phenomenology, this hidden art of the power of imagination is the “art”
of passive associative synthesis. Experience and sensual experience presuppose the
hyletic field. The structures of the hyletic50 field are the structures of inner space and
inner time. The actual now is the now of presently given impressions, the horizon of
protention is the primordial openness for new impressions in the hyletic field, and
the continuum of retentions is the dimension of the flowing off of the hyletic content
of the actual now and its protentional horizon in the continuum or retentions. The
contents of passive synthesis in the continuum of retentions are not given in temporal
succession.51 They are associated in passive synthesis. Passive synthesis guided
by similarity or, in modern terms, by gestalt structures is the phenomenological
explication of Kant’s art of the power of imagination that is hidden in the depth of
our souls.
A digression considering the use of the term “concept” and related terms in
traditional formal logic (especially from Descartes to Kant) in modern formalized
logic, and in Husserl and phenomenology is necessary to avoid misunderstandings.
Formal logic from Descartes to Kant and beyond but also already Scholastic logic
distinguishes between an intensional and an extensional interpretation of logical
terms. Most logicians of the twentieth century, especially those in the positivistic
tradition, prefer the extensional interpretation, i.e., they prefer, like W.v.O. Quine,
strictly extensional nominalistic term logics. Terms have for them only an extension,
i.e., the extension of sets of objects to which they can be applied.
Traditional logics from Descartes to Kant preferred the intensional interpretation
of logic. Terms have extensions only if quantifiers are added. Without that terms
refer to concepts and this reference is a reference to the intension, i.e., the meaning
of a term. The doctrine of concepts as a theory of the categorial structure of concepts
is already the first discipline of formal logic in the tradition of Aristotelian logic.
It is present in the doctrine of ideas, the ideae innatae, the innate ideas, and the
ideae adventitiae, the empirical ideas, in the Cartesian tradition of the Logic of Port
Royale. The technical term for the Cartesian ideas in the logic of the schools was
conceptus and this term was translated as Begriff by Christian Wolff and used by
Kant in his formal logic, in his transcendental logic, and in his distinction between
empirical concepts and concepts a priori.

49
Kant KGS III, Critique of Pure Reason, B 180f, cf. B 103. See Makreel 1990, Chap. 2, esp. 29ff.
See also Grünewald 2009, 255 for a similar interpretation of Kantian schemata and Husserlian
empirical conceptualization and essences.
50
Greek hylē is Latin materia. On the level of passive synthesis “hyletic” can always be read as
“material” and vice versa. The hyletic field is, seen in this way, a field and not a collection of
atomic sense data or impressions.
51
The givenness of temporal succession in the past presupposes the active synthesis of memory
and in addition of reproduction; see below, Chap. 3, Sect. 3.1.
32 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

This tradition and its explication in the context of an empirical psychologism

was Husserl’s problem before and in the Logical Investigations. His theory of
eidetic intuition and material and formal essences is not only meant as a rejection
of psychologism, it is alo the phenomenological solution of the problem of the
constitution of the difference between concepts a posteriori and concepts a priori,
between the ideae innatae and the ideae adventitiae as intentional objects without
presupposing Cartesian metaphysical assumptions or a Kantian transcendental
psychologism. The intension of concepts a priori and a posteriori, i.e., empirical
concepts refers to an empirical type or to a pure essence, and the application of a
concept refers to objects. There is no confusion in this respect in Husserl.52
Setting aside the question whether and how far active concept formation presup-
poses linguistic structures, it can be said that from the very beginning that active
conceptualization presupposes an active variation of the contents of the schemata as
products of passive associative imagination. It is an activity of varying, abstractively
isolating dependent and independent parts, and adding and subtracting dependent
parts in concepts of substrates. Such an activity can follow rules. The most signif-
icant set of rules includes the logical rules for defining genus, species, and specific
differences, applying the rules of Aristotelian induction to levels of concepts of
higher universality.53 The upshot is that the formation of empirical concepts already
presupposes on its lowest level, the schemata of passive associative synthesis and
the formal ontological categorial structures of first level wholes and parts; the
active variations of the isolating abstraction that isolates concepts of attributes in
concrete substrates and the generalizing abstraction that leads to concepts of higher
universality; and finally it presupposes a framework that distinguishes between
logico-grammatical possible and impossible empirical concept formations.
The intuition of material essences has, hence, its genetic foundation in pre-
given empirical concepts. What is added is the work of a “free” variation, i.e.,
a variation not guided by experience, passive associations, or free fantasy in the
narrower sense,54 but by the structures of the categories of formal ontology and
pure logical grammar. The formal essences are given in formalizing abstraction.
Formalizing abstraction presupposes that the abstraction from all material contents
can be already be applied to the categories of concept involved in forming
empirical concepts. What is added in the intuition of material essences are variations
discovering and distinguishing the foundations in categorial structures in first-order
wholes and the relations in the structure of collections of wholes and higher-order
wholes.

52
See Husserl’s explication of the meaning of concept (Begriff ) and essence (Wesen) in Hua III,
§22.
53
More precisely, the rules of the Categories and the Topic of the Aristotelian Organon. This
type of induction and its logical implications must be strictly distinguished from the induction
of predictions and causal connections.
54
Free fantasy variation in the narrower sense creates images, not schemata in the Kantian sense,
out of images in poetry and mythology: golden mountains, lions with human heads, human bodies
with the head of a falcon, vampires, and so on and so forth.
2.4 Intersubjectivity, the Paradox of Subjectivity, and Ultimate Grounding 33

Given this background, a first strategy for the analysis of morphological essences
of concrete substrates is to apply the techniques of the analysis of the essences of
dependent abstract parts and of the foundations connecting them to certain simple
aspects of concrete substrates. The second strategy is the application of the principle
of generalizing abstraction. Concepts of concrete objects of a higher degree of
universality are less complex than concepts of a lower degree of universality. The
second strategy is to thus restrict the investigation in the beginning to concepts of a
high degree of universality.55
However, even the two heuristic strategies taken together are not able to warrant
a complete analysis of the morphological essences, morphological ideal types of a
lower degree of universality and correspondingly of a higher degree of complexity.
The analysis is as such restricted to the relevant aspects of the pre-given concept. In
such cases, e.g., “medieval town,” it is better, following Schutz but also Experience
and Judgment, to talk about types and ideal types or, in the terminology of Ideas
I, noematic systems.56 The construction of such morphological ideal types requires
additional viewpoints that can be found in the specific categorial structures of the
material region of empirical sciences, e.g., the specific structure of organisms in the
life sciences or of social interactions and social institutions in the social sciences,
such as the ideal types of Alfred Schutz. Detailed analyses of such structures will
be necessary in Part III, Sect. 8.5, and Part IV, Sect. 10.4.

2.4 Intersubjectivity, the Paradox of Subjectivity,

and Ultimate Grounding

The problems connected with the phenomenological reduction and later added
reductions, the egological reduction and then the primordial reduction, within the
residuum of the phenomenological reduction cause further critical reflections and
discussions. The critical reflections on the reduction are immediately connected
with the problems of the givenness of other persons, in short Others, and in
general of intersubjectivity and the lifeworld. Husserl himself noticed later57 that
the phenomenological reduction could easily be misunderstood as a reduction to
the subjective consciousness of the phenomenologist, i.e., as solipsism. It was,

55
This is precisely the strategy proposed in Ideas I on regional ontology, see Hua III, §9, 23f.
56
Husserl, 1972, section III, §83b; see Schutz 1932, §§37, 38 and 43 on the foundation of
sociological concepts and ideal types in the everyday conceptualizations of the social world.
See also Grünewald 2009, 252, cf. 124. Grünewald’s phenomenological explication of Weber’s
ideal types as noematic systems in his interpretation of noema and noesis in Ideas I. The
difference between his explication and the explication of Schutz’s adaptation of Weber’s ideal
types mentioned above is only a terminological difference. Noesis and noema are other terms for
intentional acts, cogitationes, and intentional objects, cogitata, in the Cartesian Meditations.
57
Hua I, §42.
34 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

furthermore, obvious that a solution of this problem is a necessary condition for

a possible phenomenological epistemology of the social and human sciences.
An additional problem for the critical discussions was Husserl’s idealistic
“metaphysical” self-interpretation of the transcendental ego and of a transcendental
intersubjectivity. The critical discussions of this context began in Husserl’s con-
versations with the members of the phenomenological circle in Freiburg in the
early 1930s. The background of the conversations was material taken from the
Cartesian Meditation,58 probably also Husserl’s remarks about his research in other
unpublished lectures, e.g., the Vienna lectures and manuscripts.59 In addition it was
of significance that Aron Gurwitsch’s investigations on the pure ego60 and Alfred
Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world61 had been published before and during
this early stage of the discussions in Freiburg.
Husserl’s later writings have been published in the Husserliana beginning 1950.
The publications show that the problems of solipsism, the givenness of Others,
intersubjectivity, the social lifeworld, and the epistemology of the human sciences
were already of central significance in Husserl’s investigations in the second decade
of the twentieth century. It is neither necessary nor possible to give an adequate inter-
pretation and evaluation of the different viewpoints and positions of this material in
an introductory section of this systematic phenomenological investigation.62 What
is necessary is to give an account of the solutions for the above-mentioned problems
that will be used as guidelines in the following chapters. This account includes a
critical explication of the structure and the problems of the paradox of subjectivity
in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenologys.63 Husserl
discovered the paradox of human subjectivity as the paradox of being a Subject
(Subjektsein) for the world and at the same time being an object (Objektsein) in
the world.64 The discovery of the paradox in the Crisis presupposes, as mentioned,
the phenomenological analysis of intersubjectivity, and this analysis presupposes in
turn the egological and the primordial reduction. Seen with hindsight, however, it
is already possible to find relevant implications of the paradox in the explication
of the phenomenological reduction and the phenomenological attitude in Ideas I.

58
Cf. the editor’s introduction Hua I. Husserl had distributed typescripts of the completed German
CM, (not only the French version that was reviewed by A. Schutz) to the members of the Freiburg
circle; cf. Embree 2009a, 177f.
59
Philosophy in the Crisis of the European Humanity 1935, Hua VI, 314–348.
60
Gurwitsch 1929.
61
Schutz 1932.
62
For a short discussion of such viewpoints as they have emerged in the historical development of
the phenomenological movement, see Part V, Sect. 11.3.
63
Hua VI, §§53, 54; cf. Seebohm 1992. A concise account of Husserl’s ontological interpretation
of the paradox of subjectivity and his way out in the direction of the absolute being of the ego can
be found in Hopkins 2010, ch. 15, 210.
64
Hua VI, §53; see note 70 about the meaning of Subjektsein and Objektsein in German.
2.4 Intersubjectivity, the Paradox of Subjectivity, and Ultimate Grounding 35

Relevant material for Husserl’s own answers to the problem of a Cartesian ultimate
grounding and the paradox of subjectivity is now also available in Die Lebenswelt.65
1. The technical phenomenological term evidence refers to the mode of awareness
in which content is given in living experience for possible descriptions. Con-
sciousness is given to itself in the phenomenological attitude in apodictic
evidence, i.e., any doubt and in general any reflection on its self-givenness once
again implies the evidence of self-givenness, and so on in an indefinite iterative
regress. A critical reflection on the evidence of the givenness of objects in
direct intention shows, on the contrary, that such evidences are always dubitable,
provisional, and can be “crossed out” and replaced by other evidences in the
future.66 Only the world as the sum total of all possible objects is given in
presumptive apodicticity, i.e., the evidence of the givenness of the world is
not touched by negations or modifications of previously given evidences of the
existence of states of affairs.
2. The abbreviating formula for the universal structure of consciousness, i.e., of
all intentional acts and their objective correlates, is ego cogito cogitatum. The
function of the ego in the structure can be understood in two ways. First it can
be understood as a dependent part like the intentional acts and their objective
correlates. As such it is the focal center, the unity of all intentional acts and their
correlates in the temporal dimensions of the living present. This interpretation
is binding under the assumption that phenomenological analyses as eidetic
analyses have to presuppose the categorial structures of formal ontology as
a methodological guideline according to what has been said in the preceding
sections. For the second interpretation, the ego is in addition understood as the
active and unifying source of intentional acts, i.e., as the transcendental activity
of the unity of apperception in the Kantian and Neo-Kantian sense. As such it has
in addition the function of a necessary condition of experience that is not itself a
part of experience.
3. It is a phenomenological finding that intentional acts of consciousness in oblique
intention presuppose, either immediately or mediately, an act of direct intention.
In other words, all reflective acts of consciousness are one-sidedly founded in
intentional acts referring to objects in the world as their correlates in direct
intention. It is furthermore essential that objects given in direct intention and the
world as the sum total of objects are transcendent, i.e., they do not belong to the
temporal sphere of immanence of synthetic intentionality. Closer considerations
reveal that this structure refers to and presupposes the structure that has served as

65
Hua XXXIX, texts 23, Beilage XIX, XX and text 24. See also text 25, the rejection of the
Cartesian radical doubt in the existence of the world. For an explicit reference to the paradox
of subjectivity see 251.
66
Even a theorem in the natural sciences that has been confirmed up until now in experimental
research can be disconfirmed by further experiments in the future.
36 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

criterion for the apodicticity of the self-givenness of consciousness (1). Even

an indefinitely extended regress of iterated reflections on reflections is in its
beginning one-sidedly founded in an intentional act in direct intention that has
its objective correlate as an object in the world.67
The evidence of the givenness of the world in presumptive apodicticity in
direct intention is, hence, the foundation of the self-givenness of subjective con-
sciousness in oblique intention. No paradox is involved (1)–(3). The difficulty of
this description of the self-givenness of subjective consciousness is, however, that
phenomenology can be misunderstood as solipsism. In particular the thesis that
subjective consciousness as a necessary being has its intentional objects in the world
as more or less contingent beings implies prima facie that phenomenological expli-
cation of the residuum of the reduction has the character of the self-entertainment of
a solitary subjective consciousness. The minimum requirement for phenomenology
as a rigorous science is that it is possible to present such explications and analyses
to co-subjects who share the methodical approach of the phenomenological attitude.
Science is an intersubjective enterprise. The problem of solipsism will vanish if it is
possible to give a phenomenological explication of the givenness of other persons,
in short Others, and intersubjectivity. The analysis of the givenness of others leads,
however, together with (1)–(3) to the paradox of subjectivity.
Husserl’s first steps toward a solution of this problem, the egological and then
the primordial reduction, already caused difficulties for the members of the circles
in Freiburg and New York that will be considered briefly in the end of this chapter.
Both reductions are abstractive reductions, i.e., their residuum is an abstract aspect
within the residuum of the phenomenological reduction. These two reductions were
not mentioned in Ideas I, but seen from a systematic point of view and not from
the viewpoint of the interpretation of the text it is possible to locate their systematic
place in the context of Ideas I. The Ideas I 68 offered a list of specific reductions
that are implied by the phenomenological reduction. The reductive bracketing of
the immediate givenness of formal and material essences in the natural attitude
indicates that the specific kinds of objects in question require special analyses of
the intentional acts in which they are given. The egological and then the primordial
reduction are in the proposed systematic interpretation nothing more and nothing
less than two further reductions belonging to this systematic context.
Presupposing the givenness of the Other and intersubjectivity within the
residuum of the phenomenological reduction, the egological reduction has to
determine where, how, and to what extent intersubjectivity is implied in the
constitution of the transcendent objective correlates of subjective consciousness.
Given, e.g., objects on the lowest level of active synthesis, the level of pre-
predicative sensual experience, objects are given as transcendent objects in different

67
To the best of my knowledge, no explicit account has been given for (1) in Ideas I or elsewhere
by Husserl.
68
Hua III, §61.
2.4 Intersubjectivity, the Paradox of Subjectivity, and Ultimate Grounding 37

aspects and perspectives. As moments are given in the syntheses of subjective

consciousness these perspectives are given one after the other in the flow of inner
time-consciousness. The back side of the object will be seen or has been seen,
but is not seen now if the front side is present in the actual Now. The object as
something in its own right, rather than something belonging to the unity of the flow
of subjective consciousness, is only given under the assumption that all aspects
and perspectives not given in the actual Now are still present in this actual Now.
This assumption presupposes, however, that some modification of myself, i.e.,
some possible Other, is able to experience the other perspectives in the temporal
phase of just the actual Now in which I experience the front side of the object.
Modifications of this structure have to be present in all experiences of objects in
subjective consciousness.
The egological reduction presupposes the possible givenness of Others. The main
concern of the primordial reduction is the actual givenness of Others. The reduction
brackets the intentional constitution of all objects given for subjective consciousness
that imply in one way or the other the givenness of Others. The bracketing
presupposes the egological reduction because the main consequence of the analyses
under the egological reduction is the strict separation between the sphere of ownness
(Eigenheit) of subjective consciousness and the sphere of the intersubjectively given
transcendent objects. The residuum of the primordial reduction is the primordial
sphere of subjective consciousness and the next question is the how of the
givenness of the Other within this primordial sphere. A detailed account of the
phenomenological analysis of the givenness of the Other and intersubjectivity will
be given below in the next section. Here it is sufficient to highlight the aspects of
this analysis that are of central significance for the explication of the paradox of
subjectivity.
The Other, the alter ego, is originally given as the other living body. This
givenness has its foundation in the self-givenness of one’s own living body in the
primordial sphere. The other living body is not given as a correlate of intentional
acts of the ego, since the abstractive primordial reduction brackets the givenness of
transcendent objects as correlates of the syntheses of active intentionality. Instead,
the residuum of the reduction is the primordial sphere of passive syntheses in the
hyletic field. The ego-pole surfaces in this field only if it is awakened, i.e., attracted
or rejected by contrast phenomena. The other living body is, therefore, given in
passive synthesis in the hyletic field. Its givenness is an immediate associative
appresentation.69 The Other is associatively appresented as a part of the pre-
given field in which the ego emerges as an ego attracted or repulsed by contrast
phenomena. The appresentation of the Other as other living body is then the
foundation of the experience of one’s own living body as one living body among

69
See Hua I, §§52–55. Appresentation is not a simple Diltheyan Einfühlung, empathy. I experience
the other living body as such before, and sometimes completely without making an attempt to try
to imagine how the Other “feels” her/himself in her/his body; see Sect. 3.1 below.
38 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

other living bodies, all given in passive synthesis. This structure, together with
the awakening of active intentional acts of subjective consciousness, is the genetic
foundation of intersubjectivity.
The analysis of the original givenness of the Other and intersubjectivity implies
significant modifications in the meaning of “transcendent objects” and “tran-
scendence of the world” as correlates of active intentional synthesis in direct
intention. Intentional objects are given as transcendent objects in the residuum of
the phenomenological reduction of Ideas I only because the unity of objects does
not belong to the temporal unity of immanence of the subjective consciousness.
Guided by the egological and then the primordial reduction, further explications of
the sphere of immanence and the correlated objects indicate that the givenness of
transcendent objects is a correlate of the givenness of Others, of intersubjectivity.
The first criterion of transcendence is negative. The object is transcendent because
it does not belong to the sphere of immanence. The second criterion is positive.
The object is transcendent because it is given as an intersubjectively given object.
Further phenomenological analyses reveal that the emergence of the givenness on
the one hand of the Other and intersubjectivity and of transcendent objects on the
other are correlated dependent parts of the structure of the givenness of the world.
They are both together one-sidedly founded in the passive synthesis of contents
of the hyletic field and in passive associative synthesis. They already emerge
as correlates on the lowest level of the intentional synthetic activity of the pre-
predicative sensual experience of objects. Given this structure, it has to be said that
subjective consciousness with transcendent intentional objects is given to itself in
the world because it is given to itself as a member of an intersubjective community,
and this intersubjective community is in turn immediately given as a correlate of
the givenness of transcendent objects. This analysis adds serious modifications and
extensions to the analysis of the foundation of intentional acts in oblique intention in
intentional acts in direct intention in the residuum of the general phenomenological
reduction mentioned above in (3). Intentional acts in direct intention and their
correlates, the transcendent objects and the transcendent world in the positive sense,
presuppose the primordial self-givenness of subjective consciousness as a member
of an intersubjective community in a common world, more precisely in a common
lifeworld.
Two interpretations of this structure are possible, the epistemic interpretation and
the ontic interpretation. The epistemic interpretation is sufficient for the purposes
of a phenomenological epistemology. Of interest for the epistemic interpretation are
only the scope, the limits, and the quality of the evidences in which the objective
correlates of synthetic intentional activities are given in direct and oblique intention.
The ontic interpretation is grafted upon the epistemic interpretation. Epistemic
categories are understood as indicators of a metaphysical ontology speaking about
necessary being, contingent being, absolute being, etc. The apodicticity of the
evidence of self-consciousness indicates that the subject is a necessary being and is
prior to the being of the objects and the world given for it in dubitable or presumptive
evidence as contingent beings. The formulation of the paradox of subjectivity in the
2.4 Intersubjectivity, the Paradox of Subjectivity, and Ultimate Grounding 39

Crisis presupposes the ontic interpretation: being a subject (Subjektsein) for the
world and at the same time being an object (Objektsein) in the world.70
The emphasis on being in the first part of the formulation implies that subjective
consciousness, as a necessary being has the contingent being of the world as the
totality of objects that are contingent correlates of its synthetic intentional activity.
The second part says that subjective consciousness has itself and its objective
correlates given in oblique intention only because subjective consciousness too is
given to itself as a contingent being among other contingent beings in the world.
This is a paradox.
The following explications can show that the situation is different for the
epistemic interpretation. No paradox is involved for this interpretation
1. Objects, Others, and the world are given for subjective consciousness in different
qualities and degrees of evidence as correlates of the web of synthetic intentional
acts in direct intention.
2. Subjective consciousness is given to itself in oblique intention in apodictic
evidence. Epistemic apodicticity means that a critical reflection on the evidence
of the self-givenness of reflecting subjective consciousness re-enacts the evi-
dence of the self-givenness of subjective consciousness in the living present
of the actual Now and its protentional and retentional horizon. This is in turn
evident for the next reiterated critical reflection, etc. in a possible indefinite
regress. In addition, the infinite regress of critical reflections warrants that
epistemic explications and analyses are always open for further critical epistemic
modifications and revisions. A first critical reflection reveals that the apodictic
evidence of the self-givenness of subjective consciousness in oblique intention
has its one-sided genetic foundation in intentional acts in direct intention.
3. The evidence of the existence of objects and states of affairs given in direct
intention is always open for counter-evidences in the future horizon of the
experience of objects and, therefore, is dubitable evidence. In other words,
critical reflections on evidences of objects given in direct intention are not able to
re-enact, by themselves, the evidence of the givenness of the object in question.
The evidence of the givenness of the world as the sum total of transcendent
objects is not dubitable. It is given in open presumptive apodictic evidence.
Apodicticity means in this case that the evidence of the givenness of the world
as the sum total of all intentional objects is independent from the evidences in
which objects are given in the world. That the apodicticity of this evidence is
presumptive means that the world is given as an open horizon for changes in the
evidences in the givenness of states of affairs in the world.
4. The intentional objects given in direct intention are transcendent objects in the
positive sense. They are not only transcendent because their unity does not belong

70
Die Paradoxie der menschlichen Subjektivität: das Subjektsein für die Welt und zugleich
Objektsein in der Welt, Hua VI, §53. The verb “being” in the English translation can be understood
as an indicator of the subject-predicate relation. The German terms “Subjektsein” and “Objektsein”
are, on the contrary, ontological terms for two kinds of beings.
40 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

to the temporal unity of inner time consciousness; they are also transcendent in
the positive sense as objects given for an intersubjective community. The positive
criterion of transcendence implies that the evidence in which objects are given
for subjective consciousness is, according to (1), the evidence of the givenness
of the world for the perspective of a subjective consciousness.
5. The phenomenological explication of the evidence in which Others and intersub-
jectivity are given is the correlate of the evidence in which intentional objects are
given and vice versa. This implies in turn that objects and the world can be given
in direct intention as transcendent correlates in the positive sense only because
subjective consciousness is given to itself as a member of an intersubjective
community in the world.
What is said in (1)–(3) is a strictly epistemic version of what was said above in
the initial three points concerning the paradox of subjectivity. What is said in (4) and
(5) is the modification and extension of what was said there about the residuum of
the universal phenomenological reduction incorporating the results of the analyses
following the egological and the primordial reduction. No paradox is involved. The
epistemic definition of the apodictic evidence of the self-givenness of subjective
consciousness in oblique intention (2) is not only compatible with evidence that
intentional acts in oblique intention have their foundation, in intentional acts in
direct intention (1) and (3), but it is also compatible with epistemic evidence that
the correlates of intentionality in direct intention, the objects and the world, are
transcendent in the positive sense. What is said in (4) and (5) is a compatible expli-
cation of (1)–(3) because the apodictic self-givenness of subjective consciousness
in oblique intention presupposes as its foundation the givenness of the world as the
totality of the objects given in direct intention. (b) The transcendence of the world as
the totality of objects in the positive sense presupposes the reciprocal foundation of
its givenness for an intersubjective community; the givenness of an intersubjective
community has its genetic foundation in the givenness of the Other as a living
body and the givenness of the Other presupposes the reciprocal foundation of the
givenness of the other living body and one’s own living body on the level of passive
associative synthesis.
Hence, the subject is given to itself in apodicitic evidence in oblique intention
only because a transcendent world in the positive sense is given for the subject in its
intentional acts in direct intention. A transcendent world in this sense can be given
to the subject as a correlate of its synthetic intentionality only because this subject is
also is given for itself in direct intention in its living body in the world. No paradox
is involved. What is involved is the epistemic distinction between oblique intention
and direct intention and the explication of transcendence as transcendence in the
positive sense.
The epistemic interpretation is the general methodological framework for a phe-
nomenological epistemology. A phenomenological epistemology in the narrower
sense is interested in critical phenomenological reflections on the methods and the
methodologies of specific empirical disciplines and sciences. A phenomenological
epistemology in the broad sense as a general theory of knowing is interested in the
2.4 Intersubjectivity, the Paradox of Subjectivity, and Ultimate Grounding 41

different qualities, scopes, limits and temporal dimensions of the evidence in which
the objective correlates of intentionality are given. As a general theory of knowing,
it also includes all practical activities that imply knowledge about the environment,
the purpose and goal of action, and the means to realize the purpose. Epistemology
in this sense is a critical reflection on the intentional activity of consciousness
and its objective correlates. The main concern is to characterize the types and
degrees of the validity of the evidence implied in the experience in which the
intentional objects are given. However, phenomenology as descriptive epistemology
is not interested in descriptions of the flow of the individual lived experience of a
particular consciousness. Instead, it is interested in the description of the essential
structures of the correlation between intentional acts and intentional objects in their
temporal dimensions in inner time-consciousness. The epistemic interpretation in
(1)–(5) warrants in addition that phenomenological epistemological analyses can be
presented to the members of an intersubjective community of phenomenologists and
is, therefore, open for intersubjective critique.
Some final remarks about the phenomenological reduction, and its relation to
the various additional reductions that have been mentioned in Sect. 1.1 and in the
present section, are necessary before turning to the ontic interpretation. It can be said
with hindsight that it is possible to give a systematic account of the need to introduce
additional reductions after the introduction of the phenomenological reduction. The
need has its roots in the transition from phenomenology as descriptive psychology
to a pure phenomenology and its application to a phenomenological epistemology.
Descriptive psychology is already able to give a sufficient analysis of the operations
of the mind, the intentional acts, in which formal and material essences are given.
The paradoxical situation was, however, the claim that descriptive psychology,
i.e., an empirical discipline, is able to provide the epistemological justification for
the cognition of atemporal essences. The main purpose of the phenomenological
reduction was to avoid psychologism and to demonstrate that phenomenological
analyses of the structures of subjective consciousness can be immediately applied
to epistemological problems. As in a phenomenological epistemology, here too
the descriptions of pure phenomenology are also not interested in the individual
lived experiences of a subjective consciousness. They are interested in the universal
essential structures of the intentionality of consciousness and its correlates, the
intentional objects. What is left is only the object in general as the intentional object
given in the phenomenological attitude after the phenomenological reduction. It
is neither necessary nor possible to borrow the epistemological justification from
descriptive psychology. Pure phenomenology itself has to give this justification
within the residuum of the reduction. The explicit additional bracketing of the
givenness of a pure mathesis universalis and material essences serves as an indicator
of a special problem that was and is of central significance for the method of pure
phenomenology.
What is comparatively obvious for the bracketing of material and formal essences
is not so obvious in case of the egological and primordial reduction. Phenomenology
as descriptive psychology is a mundane discipline. It is embedded in the natural
attitude, and the givenness of other persons, intersubjectivity, and especially the
42 2 The Formal Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological Epistemology

intersubjective community of researchers in a common world is simply presupposed

as given. Thus it is beyond question that descriptive psychologists are able to present
the results of their research to an intersubjective community of researchers in the
world.
However, after the phenomenological reduction, the world and with it intersub-
jectivity and the givenness of the Other is bracketed together with the bracketing
of the natural attitude. The task of the egological and the primordial reductions is,
therefore, to determine the specific problems of the givenness of intersubjectivity
and the Other as specific aspects within the phenomenological reduction. They need
not be understood as reductions that have been added later to the phenomenological
reduction. The phenomenological analyses that have been summarized above in
(1)–(5) have shown how Others and intersubjectivity are given, and how the subject
is given to itself in direct intention as a member of an intersubjective community of
Others in the world in addition to its self-givenness in oblique intention.
In addition, however, this analysis justifies the claim the analyses of pure
phenomenology can be presented to an intersubjective community and are, hence,
open for intersubjective critique. Husserl applied the ontic interpretation not only
in his explication, but then also in his solution for the paradox of subjectivity
in the Cartesian Meditations and in the Crisis. The path of ultimate grounding
(Letztbegründung) starts with the apodictic, i.e., necessary being of a transcendental
ego, discovers in addition and behind the ego a transcendental intersubjectivity,
and finally discloses beyond this a kind of absolute primal ego (Ur Ich) as the
absolute and ultimate functioning (letztlich fungierend) source of the constitution of
transcendental intersubjectivity and subjective consciousness. Husserl nevertheless
rejected the metaphysical constructions of traditional philosophy including the
dialectical constructions of German idealism.
The main question for the methodological considerations of this chapter is how
it is possible to apply phenomenology and a phenomenological epistemology to
ontology without the support of additional metaphysical constructions. A short
glance at the application of descriptions and additional metaphysical constructions
in modern philosophy can be used as a first hint toward the solution of this problem
that will be considered again in the conclusion of this investigation.
The epistemology of the empiricists from John Locke to David Hume and later
John Stuart Mill used descriptive methods. Husserl characterized their method as
descriptive psychology.71 Metaphysical considerations based on arguments for a
sensualistic idealism or a naturalistic materialism can occur. Moreover, closer con-
siderations show that descriptive approaches are also essential for the rationalistic
tradition. Descartes’s first “Meditation” is an example, but Kant’s analysis of a
possible experience in his transcendental deduction also presupposes his descriptive
analysis (Zergliederung) of the structure of experience.72

71
Hua VI, §58, 211.
72
Seebohm 1982, 145f.
2.4 Intersubjectivity, the Paradox of Subjectivity, and Ultimate Grounding 43

Kant’s highest and ultimate condition of a possible experience is the unity of

transcendental apperception. This unity of transcendental apperception and later the
intelligible I in his practical philosophy are given in a hypothetical construction, and
they are not accessible as objects of experience. Fichte went beyond Kant with his
claim that the I as an absolute I is immediately given in intellectual intuition and
offered in addition a method to construct a deduction of the a priori structures of
experience and the material of sensibility from and within the absolute I.73 The I was
dropped in the further development and finally replaced by the absolute spirit and
Fichte’s deductive method survived only as a fore shadowing of Hegel’s dialectical
method.
Husserl’s application of phenomenology to metaphysics has nothing in common
with the metaphysical constructive proofs more geometrico of modern rationalism
before Kant. There are, however, some similarities with Kant’s hypothetical con-
structions and the attempt of the German idealists to go beyond Kant. Precisely these
dangerous affinities have been the reason for avoiding the term “transcendental” in
the considerations about a phenomenological epistemology in this part. Husserl had
used the term “transcendental” since Ideas I and the terminology he used in his later
applications of phenomenology to ontological-metaphysical problems is borrowed
from Fichte and even from Hegel. This absolute primordial ego is sometimes also
addressed as Hegelian objective spirit, probably in a Diltheyan interpretation of the
term and beyond that by interpretations of Fink.74
The ontic interpretation is grafted upon the phenomenological analyses that are
explicable as epistemic interpretation. Hence, the phenomenological epistemologi-
cal investigations in the following chapters and parts can neglect the problems of
the ontic interpretation and the possibility of the application of phenomenology
to metaphysical problems. But the paradox of subjectivity will surface again in
some disputes in the theory and philosophy of science in the past century. The
concluding remarks in Part V, Sect. 11.1 must, hence, return to the problems of
the ontic interpretation and its ontological implications, and will then be able to
add a systematic survey of the different epistemic and ontic interpretations in the
development of the phenomenological movement.

73
Cf. Seebohm 1985b, 1994b; Jalloh 1988, 189.
74
Hua VI, §54b, 55; see also Hua I, §62. For additional material, see Fink 1958, 256, 261, 271f.
Chapter 3
The Material Methodological Presuppositions
of a Phenomenological Epistemology in the
Structures of the Lifeworld

3.1 The Primordial Sphere, the Givenness of the Other,

and Animalic Understanding

It is a truism of present everyday understanding that communities in the lifeworld

are communities of individuals. The individuals are, on the one hand, self-subsisting
entities and, on the other hand, they are determined by the community and
their existence depends on the community. This self-understanding of everyday
experience is sufficient for the practical purposes of human actions and interactions
in the lifeworld. It is not sufficient for phenomenological descriptive reflection on
the constitution of the lifeworld as the primordially pre-given world. It is also not
sufficient for the interest of a phenomenological epistemology interested in the
generative foundations of the empirical sciences in the pre-given lifeworld and its
constitution. Only the aspects of the structures of the constitution of the lifeworld
that are of interest for a phenomenological epistemology will be considered in the
following summary.1
What is left after the egological and the primordial reduction bracket all contents
of consciousness and self-consciousness that imply the givenness of the other
individuals, in short Others, is the primordial sphereof consciousness. Since the

1
The German version of the Cartesian Mediations was not published before 1950, but the shift in
Husserl’s position including the turn to the problem of intersubjectivity, the lifeworld, and the
distinctions between the transcendental, the egological, and the primordial reduction has been
discussed by the members of the Freiburg circle in exile at the New School in New York. The
modifications and extensions of the following accounts, especially concerning hyletic contents,
the Here and the There of inner space, and animalic understanding, are similar to the analyses of
Cairns 2007, 313f and 317ff. and Embree 2012, ch. 3, 4, and 5. More on the constitution of the
lifeworld is now available in Husserl’s manuscripts from 1916 to 1937 in Hua XXIX.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 45

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_3
46 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

primordial sphere is given for phenomenological reflection after an abstractive

reduction, it is not a concrete whole by itself. It is an abstract genetic foundation
of and in individual consciousness and self-consciousness in the lifeworld. The
primordial sphere is in itself a whole of lower order and has, taken for itself, a
complex structure of first-order dependent moments and foundations.
What has to be distinguished are dependent moments determining the general
structure of the primordial sphere, the hyletic contents and their associative fusions
and contrasts: (1) the dependent moments in the structure of the inner time-
consciousness of the primordial sphere, namely the actually present contents
in the actual present, primordial memory (i.e., the continuum of retentions of
contents flowing off into the past) and the openness for new contents in primordial
protentions; (2) the dependent moments of the structure of the inner space of the
primordial sphere, the one Here and its contents and the manifold of Theres and
their contents surrounding the Here and its contents.
The contents of the primordial sphere are the contents of the hylē given in
contrasts and fusions as brute reality in primordial aisthesis, primordial sensibility.
Brute reality is the quasi-objective realm of what is not yet understood as a
something, a definite object with certain properties. Fusion and contrasts are consti-
tutive for the passive associative synthesis of temporally changing configurations of
contents.
The contrast of the inner and outer is the one-sided foundation for all levels of
active synthesis. The inner contents are constitutive for the inner self-givenness of
the body in the Here. Primordial self-experience is nothing more and nothing less
than this primordial self-givenness of the body in the Here. The outer contents are
given in the manifold of the There outside the body. These contents are the realm
of the quasi-objective aisthesis, primordial sensibility given for primordial lived
experience in passive synthesis. Such contents given together in contrast phenomena
in a more or less articulated background of other contents are the primordial objects
in the There. Primordial self-consciousness and primordial consciousness and its
contents are reciprocally founded in each other, i.e., they cannot be given by
themselves outside the correlation.
The body is given in primordial self-consciousness in sensual feelings inside
the body, but also partially as an object of sensual perception from the outside in
primordial aisthesis. Inner and outer are both present in the self-aisthesis of the
body. All contents of primordial aisthesis are given as changing in primordial time
and moving in inner primordial space. The present Here moves into a There that
is the new Here with a past Here in the continuum of retentions, and this past
Here is now a There for the present of the new Here. The movement happens in
the medium of changing inner and outer contents, and this change is given for
primordial lived experience of the inside and the outside as kinaesthesis.2 The inner
and outer synthesis in the movement of the body, is an activity in passivity. What
is given as active is the body but the contents given in its movements are given in

2
For a detailed account see now Behnke 2009.
3.1 The Primordial Sphere, the Givenness of the Other, and Animalic. . . 47

passive synthesis. Active intentional activity emerges only if the attention of the
ego of the experiencing consciousness3 is awakened by contrast phenomena in its
changing hyletic field.
The decisive next step in the genesis of the next level of the constitution of the
lifeworld in passive synthesis is the givenness of the other living body. Two aspects
can be distinguished. One’s own body is partially given in contents given in the
inside of the Here and partially in the outside of the manifold There. Secondly,
the living body feels itself in its kinaesthetic movements, its primordial activities.
The other living body is given from the outside and in its movements and such
movements can be experienced as immediately interfering with the movements of
my own body in bodily contact. What is not immediately given is the inner self-
experience of the other living body, its primordial self. This inner is appresented in
an associative transfer guided by the similarities of the givenness of one’s own body
from the outside and its kinaesthetic movements. The other living body, in short, the
Other as the other animate loving body are given in associative passive synthesis as
a part of primordial experience and this means as a part of immediate brute reality.
We do not first recognize dead physical objects in active intentional acts
and believe that some of them have their own lived experience with the aid of
some inference by analogy. The primordial encounter with inanimate bodies is
reciprocally founded in the experience of other living bodies.4 Dead physical
objects are transcendent objects given for an intersubjective community. What is
appresented in the associative transfer on the basis of indexical signs in the behavior
of the other living body are its drives and feelings. The associative transfer is the first
level of sympathy in its original Greek sense, feeling with and through the Other in
appresentations.
Appresentation is the foundation for the understanding of the other living body in
its life expressions. The life expressions of the other living body trigger as actions
of the other living body immediate reactions of one’s own living body and vice
versa. This exchange can be called animalic understanding.5 The understanding is,
using the terminology of C. S. Peirce, indexical. Life expressions on this level are
indexicals, not symbols. Animalic understanding has the structure of the immediate
opposition of actions and reactions, of secondness. It is, therefore, misleading to call
animalic life expressions signs of a body language. Linguistic signs are symbols.6

3
Husserl 1972, (1973), §§5–19 and Hua XI, §§28, 29. See also Gurwitsch 1929.
4
See Gurwitsch 1979, esp. pp. 74–76 and Cairns 2007, 319, about the problem of the primordial
givenness of inanimate and animate bodies.
5
The adjective “animalic” is mentioned in Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary. In this
investigation it not only includes the understanding of animals by animals or humans, but also the
understanding of animalic life expressions of other humans by humans. What is said in Cairns
2007, 314 and 321 on sense transfer and organism is similar to what is said above about animalic
life expressions and animalic understanding.
6
This does not mean that certain higher animals are not able to understand symbolic significations,
but most animals can do without it and humans can do without it in primitive encounters with other
48 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

What emerges in and with the encounter with others on the level of passive
synthesis is the intersubjective lifeworld as the structured whole of real objects
and events. The primordial “objects” of one’s own body are hyletic configurations
outside of the body in the multidimensional There. They belong to the immanence
of the primordial sphere. An object shared between the one’s own living body
and the other living body given in interactions is given as a shared transcendent
object beyond the primordial sphere with its distinction between the Here of the
own body and the Theres outside the own body. In this sense it is a transcendent
object belonging to a transcendent reality that is not only beyond the primordial
sphere, but also beyond the sphere of inner subjective intentional activity and its
experience. Transcendent objects are immediately given together within a shared
intersubjective space and a shared intersubjective time of a community. The
structures of intersubjective space and time determine the social structures between
consociates, contemporaries, predecessors, and successors and their immediate and
fixed life expressions.
An immediate consequence of the distinction between the primordial subjective
constitution and the intersubjective constitution of objects is the need to distinguish
between two types of transcendence of objects. The correlates of intentional
syntheses or cogitative types are intentional objects. The syntheses belong to the
unity of immanence. The unity of the intentional objects is a unity that does
not belong as a dependent part to the unity of immanence, and is in this sense
transcendent.
This type of transcendence must be distinguished from the transcendence of
intersubjective static but also generative constitution. The transcendent objects of
sensory subjective experience are already given, as mentioned above, in different
temporally changing perspectives. The unity of transcendent objects, e.g., for
sensory subjective lived experience is given in temporally changing different
perspectives, but, for the very same reason, it is only given as an empty presumption
in the living primordial present. The presumption implies that the perspectives
of the transcendent object that are not actually given could be given for Others,
though they are not actually given for my subjective experience in the actual
Now. Presupposing the givenness of Others; the actual experience of the actual
perspectives of Others refer to the same transcendent object. The presumption of
identical transcendent objects in my subjective lived experience has ultimately its
foundation in the possible actual presence of Others. The positive criterion for
the givenness of an actually existing identical transcendent object is the givenness
of the object in intersubjective experience, and this intersubjective experience is
also the presupposition for the discovery of the privacy and uniqueness of my own
subjective experience.

animals including other humans. For Peirce’s distinction between index and symbol, see Peirce CP
2.205–2.207. On appresentation see Hua I, §§51, 52, 55.
3.2 A Typology of Understanding 49

3.2 A Typology of Understanding

“Understanding” has many meanings. Two inseparable aspects can be distinguished

in “understanding” in the broadest sense. It is, on the one hand, the understanding
of life expressions as indicators of the intentions and feelings of Others and, on the
other hand, the understanding of the reference of life expressions to intersubjectively
given states of affairs. In both of these aspects to be able to understand implies pos-
sible misunderstanding and not-understanding of life expressions.7 Life expressions
are already given on the level of animalic understanding and then on all higher levels
as life expressions of one’s own or of other living bodies. Life expressions in this
broad sense have always an “author.”
Two types of life expressions can be distinguished, immediate life expressions
and fixed life expressions. Immediate life expressions have their genetic foundation
in animalic life expressions. They are given in the actual present and its immediate
past. They are given in the past as past immediate life expressions in one’s own
memories or as life expressions in the memories of others. Fixed life expressions
can be given intersubjectively in the actual present, but they can also be given as life
expressions of authors of a distant past beyond the scope of subjective memories
and as the same again in the future.
Three types of understanding immediate and fixed life expressions can be distin-
guished: animalic understanding, elementary understanding, and higher understand-
ing. Animalic understanding of animalic life expressions is the genetic foundation of
elementary understanding and higher understanding. The three types, and especially
elementary and higher understanding, presuppose each other in a complex system
of one-sided genetic and reciprocal foundations.8
Elementary understanding is the understanding of actions, of interactions with
others, of others as participants in interactions, of the material, the means, and
the goals of actions and interactions. The raw materials offered by the natural
environment9 in a lifeworld are understood as “as good for something,” as means and

7
To call not-understanding a kind of understanding seems to be awkward, but the expression “I do
not understand” presupposes the assumption that there is something that can be understood.
8
The terms “elementary understanding” and “higher understanding” have been introduced by
Dilthey GS 7, 207–213; SW 1, 228–234. See also Seebohm 2004, §12 and §14. Animalic
understanding as genetic foundation of both is not mentioned by Dilthey.
9
The term “natural environment” can be interpreted in the context of Hua XXXIX text 4, 6,
and 30 as referring to the originally “surrounding world” (Umwelt) of the natural attitude.
Cultural worlds have their deepest genetic foundation in the original pre-givenness of the world
as “surrounding world.” “Natural environments” in this sense are the immediate foundation of
theoretical systems of higher order understanding of nature in philosophical or scientific systems.
On the natural attitude and its correlate in the surrounding world, in Ideas I and its significance for
the development of Husserl’s concept lifeworld as historical world in Husserl’s later writings, cf.
the interpretation in Moran 2013.
50 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

goals in the practical world.10 The means in actions and interactions are tools. The
products of using tools are artefacts used for the fulfillment of the needs of everyday
life. Tools of humans are seldom found in the natural environment as materials that
are as such immediately useful for something; instead, tools are themselves artefacts
produced by other tools. Actions are understood as actions in which “how to do
something” with tools is understood and Others are understood as participants in
interactions, i.e., they are understood only in their functions and roles in the web of
elementary understanding.
Tools that are used in actions and interactions refer to each other, to the
tools that have been used to produce them or are used for their maintenance to
the raw materials; to the actions and interactions in which they are used; and to
the produced artifacts used for consumption. The objects used for consumption, the
interactions, and the raw materials refer vice versa to the system of tools used to
shape and produce them. To use something found and even roughly prepared by an
individual, animal or human, is to use a tool in a very broad sense. Tools used within
a referential system of tools, raw materials, products, and interactions are tools in
a strict sense. Only tools in this sense are of interest for elementary understanding
in the practical world. Tools, interactions, raw materials, and artifacts can also be
considered as a sign system. As signs, these parts of elementary understanding are
more than indexical signs. They are symbols and they signify themselves, but they
do so in their function for the system of elementary understanding, thereby pointing
to all other parts of the system as their interpretants.11
The system of elementary understanding is a system of goal-directed interactions.
Successful interactions presuppose immediate life expressions that can serve as
signifiers for all elements of the system before and after the interactions happen
in the actual present. Such a sign system is a linguistic system in the broadest
sense. Human discourse is originally oral discourse that is usually accompanied and
supported by gestures, and can even be replaced by a system of visible gestures. It
is possible but irrelevant for the present purpose to invent fictive cultural lifeworlds
with other types of immediate life expressions. It is a matter of terminological
convenience to use for all such cases the notions “oral communication,” “oral
discourse,” and “oral tradition” for the purposes of a descriptive analysis of the
general structures of the lifeworld.
The essential point is that the system of significations is a system of present
immediate life expressions, and that this system has to have at least the degree
of complexity of the system of the above-mentioned elements and aspects of
interactions in elementary understanding. Imitation is of crucial significance for

10
The world of elementary understanding is approximately coextensive with Schutz’s practical
world. See Embree on Schutz in Embree 1977 comparing Schutz and Gurwitsch. Cf. also Embree
1988b, esp. 121f, 127f. The practical environment is according to Hua XXXIX texts 31, 32 in the
pre-given world genetically one-sidedly founded in the pre-given world as natural environment, cf.
fn. 83.
11
Peirce CP, 5.372–5.376.
3.2 A Typology of Understanding 51

the social process of learning how to use tools and recognizing their purposes in
everyday practical life, but cooperation in the interactions of elementary under-
standing requires linguistic communication. The linguistic system required for
communication in elementary understanding is, however, restricted to commands,
information, and short explanations of “how to do.” Its task is to support the already
otherwise sufficiently articulated context of elementary understanding.
A terminological remark is necessary before turning to the level of first-order
higher understanding. The “natural environment” mentioned above is already orig-
inally given for elementary understanding. The objects given in this environment
are, as mentioned above the raw materials, the tools, the artifacts, and consociates,
i.e., the Others who are understood in the interactions in animalic, elementary, and
higher understanding in the present and its immediate past and future horizon. They
are given on this level in the world of practical goal-directed interactions, and
these objects are as such concrete first-order wholes, i.e., the independent wholes
of the theory of the whole and the parts of the Logical Investigations mentioned
in Sect. 2.2. The practical world, the environment for elementary understanding,
is a partial dependent structure within the structure of a cultural lifeworld in
general. This structural system of intentional objects as an environment given for
elementary understanding can be called “natural” because it includes more that a
“practical world” as a system of practical interactions. It includes the experience
of disturbing and destructive powers that are always able to disrupt, to interrupt,
and to destroy systems of goal directed practical interactions. It is even present
as the understanding of the frightening possibility of the complete destruction of
all conditions of the practical world and elementary understanding.12 The first and
main task of higher understanding is “to make sense,” to understand and explain the
blind forces, human forces included, behind the natural environment as a correlate
of elementary understanding.
What is understood in higher understanding is the lifeworld as a whole and
its essential aspects. Higher understanding is contemplative. It presupposes time
that is not dominated by the needs of the practical activities of elementary
understanding. Of interest for higher understanding are all relevant aspects of
elementary understanding. Of interest for higher understanding are, furthermore,
the social structures of the lifeworld and changes in the social structures, including
customs such as fashions and styles, as well as customary laws and written laws
with their distinctions between right and wrong in interactions. Of interest are,
moreover, significant deeds of members of the community that have changed
structures of the lifeworld in the past, significant changes in the natural environment
of the lifeworld, and encounters with foreign lifeworlds. The manifestations of
higher understanding are cults, artefacts serving cult activities, myths, prophetic

12
This type of environment can also be called natural environment last not least because it is just
that what is left of the environment of elementary understanding in the methodological abstraction
that is constitutive for the natural sciences; cf. Sect. 4.3.
52 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

revelations, poetry, philosophical reflections, and finally the sciences.13 Discourse

in higher understanding serves as a mirror of the understanding of the whole context
of the lifeworld or essential aspects of the lifeworld. Elementary understanding
is blind without higher understanding, but higher understanding is empty without
elementary understanding.

3.3 The Static Analysis of Social Interactions

in the Lifeworld

The everyday subjective and objective understanding of actions and interactions in

the social lifeworld is the pre-given empirical basis for generalizing abstractions
and beyond that for the construction of ideal types that can serve as methodological
tools in the social sense. What has been said about morphological types and ideal
types as constructions is sufficient for the purposes of an analysis of the general
structures of the lifeworld. More has to be said about the construction of ideal
types that can be applied in the social sciences.14 The following descriptions also
presuppose what has been said in the previous sections about the givenness of
the Other, intersubjectivity, animalic understanding, elementary understanding, and
higher understanding.15 Given this framework, Schutz’s descriptive analysis of
social interactions can be used, with some modifications and extensions, in this
section.16
The structure of intersubjective interaction in the social lifeworld has two
spatial and two temporal dimensions: the spatial dimensions of consociates and of
contemporaries, and the temporal dimensions of successors and of predecessors.
The systems of interactions include intentional expectations and memories of
actions and reactions of others beyond the scope of face-to-face relations in the
present. Such dimensions include different degrees and kinds of absence.
The absent is foreign in different dimensions and to different degrees. Some
successors were known in the present as younger members of the social lifeworld.
People living in the present usually believe that their present rules of behavior,

13
Almost nothing is said in Hua XXXIX about objects of higher understanding, cf. text 17, §2,
164f about religion and science.
14
Schutz adopted the term “ideal types” following Max Weber (see Schutz 1932, §44), but he
later rejected the Neo-Kantian implications in Weber’s understanding of the term; cf. the detailed
discussion in Sect. 10.4 below.
15
Schutz 1932, §50, presupposed for his investigations the immediate givenness of the social
lifeworld and assumed that the phenomenological question of the how of the givenness of the
lifeworld is not relevant for his purposes. The later discussions of Schutz and Gurwitsch indicate
that this assumption causes problems. See Sect. 4.5 below.
16
See Schutz 1932, §§36–41.
3.3 The Static Analysis of Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 53

values, etc., will also be valid in the future. This expectation is usually disappointed
in periods of social change. Social change, whatever the cause, creates fear, despair,
and eschatological hopes in the present of a social lifeworld.
Absence in the present is the absence of contemporaries beyond the scope
of consociates. Consociates are contemporaries in one’s own immediate cultural
lifeworld. Contemporaries outside this context are absent, foreign to one’s own
lifeworld, to different degrees. The realm of what is absent in the present is the field
of ethnological research, i.e., research interested in present foreign geographical and
cultural contexts. Absent for the present social lifeworld are dimensions that cannot
be understood within the framework of types of interactions, including linguistic
interactions, in one’s own lifeworld. The absence is present as misunderstanding
and not-understanding in the encounter with foreign contemporaries belonging to
other cultural lifeworlds. Even if such encounters are not necessarily hostile in
the beginning misunderstanding and not-understanding usually breed ethnocentric
hostility.
Absence in the dimension of the past is the absence of predecessors. Two types of
this absence can be distinguished. (1) Predecessors are present because their actions
and interactions, including the effects of such actions, predetermine the framework
of possible activities of those living in the present and their successors. However,
they are presently absent because their past actions and interactions can no longer
be changed or modified in the present of the social lifeworld. (2) The second type
of absence is an analogue of the absence of contemporaries. There are actions
and interactions of predecessors in the past that cannot be understood within the
framework of the ideal types of actions and interactions in the present. The amount
of possible not-understanding and misunderstanding of predecessors grows with the
increase of the temporal distance separating the present and the past phases of the
social lifeworld and its present naïve understanding of the past.
The dimension of the past as a dimension of absence is the dimension of
tradition and of history in the lifeworld. It is, therefore, necessary to return to the
analysis of the primordial structures of temporality and the genetic foundations of
intersubjective temporality in the lifeworld.17 The main purpose of the preceding
analysis of the temporal structures and genetic foundations of predecessors and
of the past dimension in a social community was to keep the door open for
the phenomenological analysis of the dimension of the structures of generation
and historical development. However, the analysis given is also presupposed for
the phenomenological analysis of ideal types like “predecessor,” “contemporary,”
“tradition,” and “history,” that have already been used in the static analysis of the
social lifeworld.

17
Schutz 1932, §50 presupposed for phenomenological descriptions the immediate givens of the
lifeworld as a whole in the present in direct intention, but the presentation of the Other is not an
immediate presentation of the Other and it is it is difficult, even impossible, to reduce the givens of
the past in subjective reproductions and intersubjective reconstructions to a primordial immediate
awareness.
54 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

Two temporal sequences can be distinguished in the process of the subjective

reproduction of past sequences of events: the sequence of reproducing intentional
acts in the present and the intentional object of the reproduction, i.e., the temporal
sequence of reproduced past events.18 To assume that both sequences are connected
by an unbroken chain of events that are not reproduced is natural and justified.
It is justified because both phases belong to the unity of primordial inner time-
consciousness. The problem is, however, that the distinction between the temporal
sequence of reproducing and the series of reproductions also happens within the flux
of inner time.
The complex formal structure behind the unity of the reproduced and the
reproducing sequences can be discovered with the aid of an attempt to close the
temporal gap between the sequences of reproductions and reproducing by simply
counting time phases of a series of reproduced contents starting with a deliberately
chosen time phase in the past and trying to determine the number of the actual
Now in this series. Prima facie one should expect that the actual Now ought to
be reached in the process of a reproduction of time beginning in a finite temporal
distance in the past. But this is not the case. After the last time phase of the
reproduced sequence has been reached, e.g., a sequence of four distinct impressions
of red, blue, green, and yellow, the series of reproduced time phases hits the phase
of the first reproduction of red. The next sequence is then the sequence of the
reproduction of the reproduction of red, blue, green and yellow, and so on in
indefinitum.19
The past is given for an intersubjective community in the lifeworld in reconstruc-
tions. It has been shown above at the end of Sect. 2.2 that subjective recollections
of the past sequence of events and the intersubjectively reconstructed temporal
sequence of past events have the same formal temporal structure. What has to be
added now is that two correlated temporal sequences can also be distinguished in
the intersubjective reconstructions of the past, namely the reconstructed sequence
of the past events and the sequence of reconstructing in the present.
The contents of the intersubjectively recognized reconstruction are different
memories and reproductions of contemporary members of the community and the
reproductions of reproductions of predecessors. The contents are present in the
medium of immediate and fixed life expressions of contemporaries and prede-
cessors. The reconstruction of sequences of past events as a synthetic intentional
activity implies, hence, intersubjectivity, and its intentional objects are sequences
of past events. Events are not simply facts. They are understood as facts that
have meaning and significance. Reconstructions have, therefore, the character of
interpretations of the tradition of the community. A tradition, regardless of whether
it emerged in an ongoing sequence of reproductive activities or is traced back

18
Subjective reproductions presuppose the material of memories. With regard to the structures
of subjectively reproduced and intersubjectively reconstructed past series of events, see Sect. 2.2
above on the temporal structures underlying genetic and generative foundations.
19
See. Seebohm 2004, 221; cf. Cantor 1962, 168–169, 195, 390ff.
3.3 The Static Analysis of Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 55

to some social authority, is itself an authority governing the present life of an

intersubjective community. That it is an authority means that it ought to be applied
in the community. Interpretation and application are both present as correlates in the
reconstruction and the steady growth of a tradition.20
What has been said in the preceding digression is presupposed and must be
kept in mind in all static analyses of the significance of predecessors for social
interactions. Predecessors are present in the medium of the tradition of a lifeworld.
They are present in the beginning in the individual memories of consociates, and
later in the tales about what happened in a more distant past of older contemporaries.
Such tales can be memorized and reproduced through generations in the oral
tradition as the medium in which predecessors can be re-presented in the present
lifeworld. Beyond that, predecessors can be re-presented in the present lifeworld
only with the aid of fixed life expressions,21 monuments or texts. Monuments are
buildings, paintings, sculptures, but also tools and all other traces of the activities of
predecessors, and this means that the predecessors are appresent as the authors of
the fixed life expressions. Oral traditions can be supported by monuments. Written
or literary traditions presuppose written discourse. Written discourse is able to re-
present the whole literary tradition of a culture including myths, prophecies, poetry,
histories, i.e., written reports about what happened in the past, and finally there are
philosophical and scientific texts.
Generative phenomenology is able to give a more detailed account of the
different types of the givenness of predecessors and their past in the present
lifeworld. As already mentioned, Husserl introduced the distinction between static
and genetic phenomenology between 1917 and 1921 and the distinction between
genetic and generative phenomenology more than 10 years later in the wake of the
Cartesian Meditations. The task of genetic and generative phenomenology is the
analysis of the genetic or generative foundations of the constitution of transcendent
objects. Genetic constitutions and genetic foundations are usually understood as
counterparts of subjective static primordial passive and active constitutions, and
generative constitutions and foundations are usually understood as counterparts
of static intersubjective constitution in Husserl’s writings and in the literature.22
The temporal structures determining genetic and generative foundations have
been considered in the preceding section, and the distinction between subjective
primordial constitution and intersubjective constitution of the transcendence of
objects has been introduced at the end of Sect. 2.4. The formal ontological structures
of genetic and generative constitutions and foundations have been analyzed at the
end of Sect. 2.2.

20
This analysis of the underlying temporal structures of the interplay of interpretation and
application is of basic significance for the epistemology of the historical human sciences. See
below n. 98 on Gadamer 1965.
21
According to Dilthey monuments as well as texts are fixed life expressions of past predecessors.
Schutz’s term “sign” is too broad. There are many other types of signs.
22
Cf. Steinbock 1997 and Welton 1997.
56 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

3.4 The Generative Structures of Socio-Cultural

Developments in the Lifeworld

Oral discourse in a cultural lifeworld without written discourse can reach consoci-
ates only in a limited spatial distance, and the past of the predecessors is present
for such cultural lifeworlds only in oral tradition. Oral traditions are restricted to the
subjective memories of consociates, the tales of old consociates, and beyond that
only in memorized sagas and myths. Oral discourse is an immediate life expression.
Written discourse is a fixed life expression. Words in oral discourse are symbols
that refer to intersubjectively given objects, people included, and these objects refer
in turn to other objects in the systems of elementary and higher understanding.
Written discourse refers in addition to oral discourse, and this indicates that socio-
cultural lifeworlds with oral but without written discourse are the foundation for the
generation of socio-cultural lifeworlds with written discourse.23
Fixed life expressions of authors in a distant past can be given as the same
again in the present and in the future. Written discourse can also be sent into
another spatial environment over large distances. Whether the written discourse
is hieroglyphic, (i.e., uses first of all signs for kinds of objects) or alphabetical is
irrelevant, and it is also irrelevant what other types of “writing” can be fancied or
created with modern technologies.
Written discourses refer back to an author of a past elementary or first-order
higher understanding of her/his contemporary state of affairs in the broadest
sense. Second-order elementary understanding is immediately implied in first-
order elementary understanding. The life expressions of others are in this context
understood only as indicators of the function of Others in the context of a
social interactions, and not as an understanding of Others as Others. First-order
higher understanding is the creative understanding or interpretation of and in the
present lifeworld. A task of second-order higher understanding is to understand
the written discourses representing the tradition of a present cultural lifeworld.
Second-order higher understanding has two aspects, the interpretation of the text
and the application of the text in the present cultural situation of the interpreter. Both
aspects are inseparable. They presuppose each other in a reciprocal foundation.24 To
separate them requires an abstractive reduction. The term “higher understanding”
will be used from now on exclusively for first-order creative higher understanding,

23
The assumption that written discourse in a lifeworld without oral discourse can function as a
substitute for oral discourse in communication in the present has to presuppose communication via
immediate bodily life expressions as its own necessary substructure.
24
Gadamer 1965, part II, section II, esp. 1.b and 2.a, 2.c. The problem of the relation of
interpretation and application is one of the basic problems for philological hermeneutics and of
basic significance for the epistemology of the human historical and systematic or social sciences.
The separation of interpretation and application in the human sciences presupposes the possibility
of an abstractive reduction that is able to separate interpretation and application. See below esp.
Part II, Sects. 5.3–5.5, 7.1; and Part IV esp. Sects. 10.2 and 10.6.
3.4 The Generative Structures of Socio-Cultural Developments in the Lifeworld 57

and the terms “interpretation” and “application” will refer to “re-creative secondary
higher understanding” in the following sections, chapters, and parts.
Interpretation of what is pre-given in the tradition in cultural lifeworlds without
written traditions is restricted to the oral repetition of what has been memorized in
generations of predecessors. Whether or not the re-created repetitions of what has
been created and then memorized through generations in the tradition corresponds to
the first-order creative understanding can only be determined in authorized decisions
of shamans, priests, or chieftains. There are no presently given “facts” that could be
used in arguments against the authorized decisions. What seemed to be different in
a past present phase remains hidden behind the activities of present discourse and
communication in later phases.
The situation for the interpretation of the sources for systems of first-order
understanding in cultural lifeworlds with a written tradition is radically different.
Written traditions have the potential for the generation of complex static interrela-
tions and generative foundations. Such structures are present to different degrees in
all cultural lifeworlds with a written tradition. Of basic significance is first of all
the generative interplay of application and rejection of the truth claims of texts and
their interpretations. Whole texts together with the tradition of their interpretation
and even whole literary traditions can be rejected or recognized as the warrants of
eternal truth for and in the present situation of a literary tradition.
The application of texts in the present needs interpretations. Whether an inter-
pretation of the text really represents the original meaning of the author, e.g., as a
prophet, lawgiver, or poet is always questionable in the present. The main task for
the survival of the written tradition of a cultural lifeworld is to create standards for
the interpretation of the original truth of the holy texts. The interpretations need
justifications, and the source for the justifications in the present in archaic societies
are again the authorized decisions of “professionals,” e.g., of the priests of poly-
theistic and monotheistic religions and their hierarchies. Authorized interpretations
of texts in a literary tradition can be applied, but they can also be rejected by other
authorities as false interpretations. If the rejection is radical, the false interpretation
will be forgotten in later phases of the development.
The situation can be radicalized if the truth claims of texts and, even whole
traditions of texts representing the higher understanding of past periods that does
not seem to be applicable in the present, are rejected as false and replaced by texts
with new types of higher understanding. The sudden emergence and acceptance of a
new system of higher understanding demands the more or less complete rejection of
a past tradition as a “false tradition” in such cases. If the turn is radical, the rejection
implies the command to destroy all texts and monuments of the old tradition. What
is left is the memory that this tradition is false, morally rotten, and that it is not
worthwhile, or even dangerous, to know parts of this tradition.
The rejection of certain aspects of old traditions can be partial and temporarily
limited. In such situations they are able to be “fashionable” again. A re-birth is
possible even in case of a more or less complete rejection of a tradition as “false”
and the command to destroy all texts and monuments of the old false tradition.
Some fixed life expressions can survive the destruction. The old tradition was
58 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

forgotten, but it can be re-discovered and brought to life. The rejection itself will
now be at least partially rejected, and attempts will be made to apply parts of
the old tradition in a new and different cultural context. Such a return “back to
the sources” of an old tradition, connected with a turn against essential parts of the
younger tradition, is a renaissance. It is a reformation if the rejection is restricted to
a tradition of interpretations and applications of the original sources of older levels
of the tradition.
A second aspect of the generative development of cultures with a written tradition
is the evolution of different types of literary meta-genres. In the first archaic
phase of the development, one literary meta-genre represents all aspects of creative
higher understanding in a lifeworld. This higher understanding comprises the higher
understanding of the natural environment and the forces behind changes in the
natural environment as well as changes in the social environment and its distribution
of political powers, of customs and laws, of wisdom, of significant technological
inventions in elementary understanding; reports about what happened in the past;
and of poetry. All of this appears in the mythologies of animistic and polytheistic
religions and in the collections of the teaching of prophets of monotheistic religions.
The contents are different in different archaic cultures, but the formal common
denominator is that only one meta-genre represents all relevant aspects of the
lifeworld and that the interpretation of this meta-genre has its justification in the
authorized decisions of professional elites.
Archaic literary traditions have the ideal potential to generate a system of
different literary meta-genres in literary traditions, e.g., legal literature, poetry,
theological literatures, or philosophical literature reflecting different aspects of the
lifeworld; treatises about technological inventions, philological literature reflecting
the literary tradition; and finally, the literature of sciences. The systems of different
meta-genres are different in different literary traditions. Seen from a formal point of
view, archaic literary cultures are wholes of the second-order n  1 and as such are
the foundation for literary cultures with a complex literary system as wholes of the
second order n.
The structures and generative foundations of the development of a literary
tradition are correlates of changes in the social structures of a cultural lifeworld.
In the early phases of the development of a literary culture, the trust in the truth and
unity of the oral and/or written tradition is a necessary condition for the stability
of the social structures of archaic cultures. The trust in the tradition and the need
to apply it again in the present and its future horizon vanishes step by step in the
development of a literary tradition with different meta-genres, with the increase of
the amount of rejections of parts of the old tradition, and with their replacement
by new “truths.” The development of, e.g., an independent legal literature and/or
independent philosophical reflections about right and wrong, good and evil, and
last but not least nature is the generative foundation for partial rejections of the
contents of the religious literature, and finally even of religion itself. Poetry and art
freed from the fetters of their functions in religious services and cults can secularize
certain religious contents and give preference to worldly perspectives.
3.4 The Generative Structures of Socio-Cultural Developments in the Lifeworld 59

This stage in the development of a literary tradition is the generative foundation

for the possibility of a period of crisis in this literary tradition. Indicators of a
crisis are the emergence of a naïve and/or philosophical skepticism denying truth
in the tradition because the authorities of the tradition contradict each other. The
counterpart of an educated skepticism is a philological scholarship teaching that the
tradition with its tensions and controversies represents an ideal universe of truth
and humanity. A crisis of a literary tradition indicates a crisis of the correlated
socio-cultural system of a lifeworld. The warrant of a stable social and political
system of a cultural lifeworld in such periods is a secular system of legislation,
political power, and laws. Such situations are the generative foundation for possible
universal rejections of the old tradition and the emergence of a new cultural and
literary tradition. Additional conditions determine whether or not the critical phase
in an old tradition will be rejected and replaced by a new beginning. Such additional
conditions, as for example an accumulation of intercultural encounters, can trigger a
yearning for a system of higher interpretation that restores the original archaic unity
of the social structures and the worldview of the lifeworld on a higher level. The old
tradition will be completely rejected if such a new system of higher interpretation is
successful.
There are, furthermore, external generative foundations for more or less radical
changes in the development of a culture and its literary tradition. Whether external
factors occur and whether or not they introduce change in a cultural lifewold is an
empirical question. However, it is possible to determine material ideal types of exter-
nal factors and the relations between the factors and a cultural lifeworld. The ideal
types have a common formal structure. The cultural lifeworld is a whole of a higher
order n  1 entering a relation with a member of a collection of the higher order n.
External factors can be changes in the natural environment. Some changes
in the natural environment of a lifeworld are natural events, and some are also
side effects of human activities on the level of elementary understanding and
its technological development. Such changes will generate destructions and then
more or less radical modifications of the elementary and higher understanding,
and with it the cultural tradition of a cultural lifeworld. Other external factors
can be intercultural encounters. Several types of such encounters between two or
more different cultural lifeworlds can be distinguished. Archaic cultural lifeworlds
with oral or written traditions are originally restricted to a narrow intersubjectively
given space, the homeland of the lifeworld. Encounters with contemporaries outside
the homeland and their tradition are encounters with foreigners. The encounters
can be peaceful if they are restricted to the level of elementary understanding,
i.e., the exchange of products, tools, and raw materials. The encounters can be
violent if contents of incompatible systems of higher understanding are involved.
The outcome is reciprocal not-understanding and rejection.
Encounters remain peaceful if the homelands of different cultural lifeworlds
are sufficiently separated in space and the encounters are restricted to occasional
individual contacts, e.g., Marco Polo’s contacts with China for Europe. The
encounters can be more or less violent if the homelands intersect, e.g., between
the Muslim culture of the Turks and Byzantium. The outcome can be the complete
60 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

destruction of the foreign cultural lifeworld; it can be one-sided or reciprocal partial

adaptation and/or partial distortion and re-interpretation of the contents of the
traditions; and it can be in the end the symbiosis of different traditions of different
social groups within one cultural lifeworld.
The situation is different for the encounter between cultural lifeworlds with
highly developed literary traditions and cultural lifeworlds with oral traditions or
archaic written traditions. A highly developed written tradition is a correlate of a
culture with complex technological, economic, and political structures and last but
not least military technologies. Special geographical factors can save cultures with
an oral or archaic written tradition in the case of such encounters. In all other cases
the oral tradition will effectively vanish in few generations. Only some folkloric
customs and old fairy tales will be left. Cultures with an archaic written tradition
have some chance of surviving as subcultures, and even have the chance of a
partial revival in a “renaissance,” a re-discovery of their roots in written sources
and monuments.
But the successful survival of a culture in repeated intercultural encounters also
has serious consequences. The cultural lifeworlds in large and partially secularized
empires have complex literary traditions that have lost their archaic unity in a
maze of reciprocal rejections of partial aspects of the tradition. The influence of
partially integrated contents of foreign literary traditions is a significant factor for
an accelerated disintegration of the cultural tradition.

3.5 Causal Relations and Facts in the Lifeworld

Precise definitions of causation (i.e., causes, circumstantial or initial conditions,

laws of nature, facts, and causal explanations) presuppose the natural sciences
and reflections on the methodology of the natural sciences. They belong to the
conceptual framework and the worldview of cultural lifeworlds with sciences. Such
lifeworlds have their immediate generative foundation in pre-scientific lifeworlds
with a specific literary tradition. Beyond this earlier pre-figurations of the under-
standing of causation can be found on all levels of the generative development of
lifeworlds. Such old layers of the understanding of causation are still present in
everyday behavior in a lifeworld with sciences.
Regular change of contents is already a necessary structural element on the
primordial level. The experience of regular changes in the primordial past is the
presupposition of more or less reliable primordial primary expectations and of
the genesis of habits. The experience of disappointments of primary expectations
followed by the partial or complete destruction of habits is a painful primordial
experience. This structure is the genetic foundation for lived experience on the level
of animalic understanding.25

25
For a thorough account see Behnke 2009, §4 on protentionality and §5 on bodily protentionality.
3.5 Causal Relations and Facts in the Lifeworld 61

Regular change in states of affairs of identifiable objects experienced in the past is

the presupposition for the confirmed (and occasionally disconfirmed) expectations
of elementary understanding. This structure is the foundation for the distinctions
between raw materials, tools, artifacts, and human actions and interactions. The
raw materials are experienced as the material conditions, the tools are understood
as the means, and the created artifact is understood as the purpose and end of
human actions and interactions. Outside this context the raw material is meaningless
and the tools are also meaningless as tools. They have meaning for elementary
understanding only in their relation to the purpose and the act of the actor(s) who
want to create the purpose of the action. In a purposeful act the cause that moves is
the act, the end is the artifact, and the raw material is the material condition. Tools
serving a means either belong to the material conditions or are themselves artifacts.
Actions as causes are of interest for elementary understanding only as immediate
or mediated parts of interactions of consociates. Complex interactions require first of
all rules of conduct for participating consociates. The rules are the laws of customs.
Actions of individuals or groups of individuals interrupting the interaction and
causing damage are understood as breaking the laws and are punished, sanctioned
by the community of consociates involved in interactions. Secondly, complex
interactions require leadership, and with it command and obedience. The role of
the leader(s) will once again be defined by customary law. On higher levels of
social interactions, leadership is entitled to give additional laws and to determine
sanctions. This step already presupposes a cultural lifeworld with a written tradition.
The actions of lawgiving are causes of a higher order. They have their material
conditions in the pre-given social structures. The means are the techniques and tools
of social and political power.
For elementary understanding, causes are actions, and the moving forces behind
the actions are the goals that have to be achieved, the artefacts and the social
structures serving the goal-directed interactions of the community in actions of the
second order. The material conditions are the raw materials and the system of tools.
The systems of tools are the systems of artifacts that have been prepared in the past
and are used as means in the present. Both together prepare the opportunity for
actions, but in many cases opportunities to act require cases waiting for or finding
favorable situations.
The structure of understanding causation and its conditions in elementary
understanding is in general the foundation for the experience of causation in higher
understanding. What has to be understood in higher understanding is the structure
of social and technological actions and interactions just considered. Of central
interest is also change in the whole structure of elementary understanding or at least
essential parts of it and its social implements. Such outstanding changes can be
called events in the narrower sense. Beneficial or destructive events of this kind are
understood as caused by extraordinary higher powers. Serious changes of this order
are, on the one hand, caused by outstanding individuals or groups of individuals
either within a social and cultural lifeworld or encountered in intercultural contacts.
Such events can be technological inventions causing essential changes in the system
of tools and artefacts or changes in the social structure of a lifeworld. But changes
62 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

can be caused, on the other hand, by events in the natural environment of a lifeworld.
The natural environment is in general understood as a beneficial or destructive power
beyond the limits of elementary understanding.
The old Latin meaning of causa and factum can be used as a guiding thread back
to their pre-scientific original meaning. The meaning of factum, i. e., something that
has been made, implies that a fact is caused by the action of somebody who was the
causa of the factum, i.e., the one who has done it and is, therefore, responsible for
the factum and in this sense guilty. What was done is worthwhile of being reported
in historiae if it is of religious, political, legal, or technological significance.
Higher understanding of causation is, hence, first of all the attempt to develop
systems in which such powers can be understood. Different types of such systems
of higher understanding can be distinguished. Some religions, including animistic
and polytheistic religions, understand such events (and beyond this the whole natural
environment) as caused by good or evil spirits or benevolent or hostile gods or the
one God in monotheistic religions. What they have in common is that they project
the structures of what can be understood in elementary understanding, including the
understanding of causation, into the “beyond” of divine creative powers that cause
events in the natural environment in a way that cannot be understood as an analogy
of the “efficiency” of a tool as a cause. It can only be understood as an analogy of
the creation of artifacts.
Divine causation is also of significance for human actions. God(s) demand and
punish disobedience. In the more sophisticated contexts of book religions they give
laws and define punishments for actions against the law. It was also possible to
develop the idea of laws of nature in monotheistic religions as systems of higher
interpretation. God created the world and the “cause” for the laws of nature (i.e., the
laws for causes that determine regular change in the natural environment, especially
celestial changes) is the will of God and his commands. The law of nature for human
beings is the moral law, and humans can sin against this law. Nature, however, obeys
its law without exception. Extraordinary events in nature are possible, but once again
they have their cause in the will of God.
The first aspect of the understanding of causation in a pre-scientific lifeworld has
its one-sided foundation in the activities of elementary understanding. Causation is
understood as regular change following actions using tools26 to reach desired goals
in the medium of raw material taken from or in the natural environment. The pre-
scientific philosophical understanding of causation with its distinction of efficient,
final, formal, and material causes is at least partially the outcome of reflections
on this structure on the level of higher understanding. The second aspect has its
roots in observations of dramatic changes in the regular course of nature. They
are understood following the model of significant human actions causing changes
in social but also technological structures. Changes in the natural environment
are understood as actions of divine powers. The third aspect is given with the

26
This aspect of the understanding of causation is “mechaniistc,” mechanē understood in the old
Greek sense as using a tool as a means to realize a purpose.
3.5 Causal Relations and Facts in the Lifeworld 63

explanation of the undisturbed regular change in the natural environment following

“eternal laws of nature,” and in general the understanding of the universe as a law-
governed universe. The cause of such laws is the will of God.27
The deepest layer in the generation of the understanding of causation in the
lifeworld is the tension between the present and its immediate future horizon in the
fulfillment or disappointment of expectations. What is expected and then present
or not present are facts, transcendent states of affairs. Facts in this sense are given
in intersubjective experience in different perspectives. Doubts about “what is really
the case” are possible. But the perspectives of Others can be “verified” because it is
also possible to move into the place of the Other and vice versa within the immediate
future horizon of the present.
The situation is different for the past horizon of the present and especially for the
dimension of a more distant past present. Facts in the past are given intersubjectively
only as reproduced facts. A reproduction of past facts presupposes subjective
memories of the participants in the reconstruction of the temporal sequence in which
the past facts have happened. An exchange of perspectives is impossible. In the
intersubjective reproduction of a discussion one person remembers what she/he has
said, the other what she/he has heard. A dispute about what has really been said
is impossible in case of immediate life expressions. It is impossible to share the
contents of the memories of the Other in original evidence. Additional evidence
is necessary if witnesses of past facts contradict each other. A decision is possible
only if “hard evidences,” i.e., traces of what has happened, are available for an
intersubjectively acceptable final decision in a dispute about what really happened
in a past temporal sequence.
Traces are, on the one hand, effects of past events and actions in the past that
are still given in original evidence in the present. Traces of this kind must be
distinguished from reports about what happened. Reports are fixed life expressions
in written discourse created by authors in the past. Traces and reports together are
able to decide questions about past facts in disputes about reconstructions of what
really happened in the past. But even traces can contradict each other, and final
answers to the historical question of what was really the case are impossible. What
seems to be final can always be challenged with the discovery of additional traces.
Facts given as past facts can be explained. The problem of causal explanation is
to find the preceding cause for a reproduced past fact. It is a retrodiction, and as such
is precisely the reverse of a prediction. A prediction is the expectation that a not yet
given fact will be given in the future horizon of the present in which another fact, the
cause, is already given in original evidence. Causation has two different temporal
aspects in the lifeworld; the one-sided foundation of predictions is the actual present
and its future horizon. The one sided foundation of an explanation is a past present
and its past horizon. The different temporal structures imply different intentional
objects. The problem of expectations and predictions in elementary understanding

27
See, for example, Thomas of Aquinas 1882, I. II qu. 91, art. 1; qu. 93 art. 1–3 on the eternal law,
i.e., the laws of nature (not the natural law!) and their origin in the reason of God.
64 3 The Material Methodological Presuppositions of a Phenomenological. . .

is the confirmation or disconfirmation of a causal rule governing the successful

application of tools to raw materials in actions and interactions. The criteria for
confirmations and disconfirmations are expected but then also presently given facts.
What is in question is the causal rule, not the facts. Explanation applies causal rules
to a temporal sequence of reconstructed facts. The causal rules are presupposed and
are not in question. What is questionable is whether or not this or that involved fact
was really the case. The explanation is disconfirmed with the assumption that the
assumed fact was in fact not the case. The underlying causal rule is by no means
disconfirmed or weakened. The explanation is disconfirmed because the application
of the rule is pointless.
Chapter 4
The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences:
First Steps Toward a Phenomenological
Epistemology

4.1 The Emergence of the Human Sciences

in the European Tradition

The “pre-history” of the social and the human sciences in Classical Antiquity and in
the Middle Ages is different. The social disciplines of law, ethics, politics, and even
economics were been respectable disciplines of practical and normative philosophy
ever since Plato and Aristotle. In the Roman Empire the law and administration
grew into a special professional discipline, jurisprudence. The practical experience
of the jurists was then the source for their theoretical reflections on the theoretical
principles of justice, the law, and lawgiving in the Hellenistic period and in the
Byzantine Empire.1
In the Middle Ages the law, politics, and economy were respectable practical
disciplines in the medieval interpretation of the Aristotelian system of philosophical
sciences in the universities. Jurisprudence itself had the rank of a higher faculty, but
the law also had together with the other social disciplines its place in theological-
philosophical systems.2 Especially after the full integration of the Roman law
system in Bologna, the theoretical reflections of Roman jurists were of special
significance in such reflections about the law, lawgiving, and the distribution of
political power in the European tradition.
Except for the Aristotelian theory of poetics, history and philology never
achieved the rank of academic disciplines. They also had no also place the artes
liberales in the Middle Ages. However, history was of significance in Greek
Classical Antiquity. The Greeks knew historiai as a literary genre. A historia,
a narration, was for them a report about events and facts in general, including

1
The systematic collection of the Roman law in the Codex Justinianus has been of basic
significance for the development of law systems in the Middle Ages.
2
Thomas of Aquinas 1882, II. II. qu. 95–97.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 65

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_4
66 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

“histories” about animals, precious materials, etc. such as the “Historia animalium”
of Aristotle.3 Later, the genre was taken in the narrower sense of histories about
human deeds of predecessors in the past that are of significance for contemporaries,
especially as examples for moral praise or blame. Historia as a literary genre in
Classical Antiquity with its branch of epic poetry had its own Muse, Clio.
The birthplace of historiography in the proper sense was Rome and first in the
history from the time of the founding of the city, the Ab urbe condita of Livius. The
first “world” chronicles added the Greek interest in historiai about foreign cultures
to the historia of the Roman Empire. This tradition was still alive in world chronicles
of Christian monks in the Byzantine Empire, now including in addition the history
of salvation. When speaking of history and historians in the period of Classical
Antiquity it should be kept in mind that in the beginning the span of the historical
time for early historians writing world histories was 150 years, e.g., for Ephoros,
and if myths are excluded, only 50 years are left. Even much later, in the history
of Diodoros, again including myths, it was limited to the last 500 years. The main
interest of such histories was only the significance of past events and deeds for the
present.
In the age of late classical Hellenism, the study of histories about predecessors
and their deeds was a part of philologia4 and not a science. Philology included
grammar and collections of hermeneutical rules for the interpretation of texts, first of
all the theory of the levels of interpretation. The goal of the philologist was universal
erudition, and with it, the universal wisdom and the ideal of true humanity that
can be found in the treasure house of literary tradition. The task was not only to
interpret an old and complex literary tradition as the source of “truth, goodness, and
beauty,” but also to apply this wisdom in concrete situations. Rhetoric, as the art of
application, was the necessary complement of philology as the art of interpretation.
Interpretation and application were there understood as two sides of the same coin in
the philological-rhetorical syndrome of late Classical Antiquity. For the philologists
philosophy was only a part of the literary tradition and of the universal wisdom of
the philologist. The philosophers, however, defended their access to truth with a
version of Plato’s argument against the poet/prophet in the Ion: The philologist, and
by implication the historian, knows only what has been said and what was the case,
i.e., the facts, but he does not know the truth.5
Philology in this sense presupposes and has its historical generative foundation
in a highly developed and complex literary tradition. The task of the interpretation
of the tradition in archaic literary cultures requires only the thorough knowledge
of the verbal meaning of the holy texts and the application of the implied laws to
judgments about social behavior in the society and religious rituals. The philologist-
rhetorician was, on the contrary, a secularized interpreter of the tradition and was not

3
This meaning of the term “history” is still present in terms like “museum of natural history” as a
collection of precious stones and all kinds of curious and surprising objects.
4
Seebohm 2004, §2.
5
Plato 334c.
4.1 The Emergence of the Human Sciences in the European Tradition 67

recognized as an authorized official interpreter of a religious tradition. The task of

the philologist was to understand and to defend a complex tradition that was partially
contaminated by reciprocal rejections and contradictions as a unity representing the
ideal of humanity. Skepticism emphasizing the contradictions in the tradition was,
hence, the companion and counterpart of philologia in late Classical Antiquity.
The understanding of texts and monuments beyond the horizon of the presently
given horizon of one’s own tradition was a problem that occurred for the first
time in the Renaissance and Reformation of the European tradition. The slogan
“back to the sources” once again has its genetic foundation in a specific structure
of the literary tradition. The structure presupposes the rejection of large parts of
the tradition of Classical Antiquity in the Christian “cultural revolution” in late
Classical Antiquity beginning with the closing of libraries and the destruction of
temples at the end of the fourth century and ending with the expulsion of the
philosophers under the emperor Justinian in 529. The literary heritage of Hellenism
and Classical Antiquity vanished almost completely, even in the schools for the
administrators of the empire. Traces of the heritage survived hidden in private and
state-related libraries in Byzantium.6 Much of the Latin literature was lost in the
following centuries with the decline of Rome and the final victory of the Teutonic
tribes in the West. A part of what was left in the East in Persian, Arabic, and
Jewish medieval culture reached Western Europe via Spain in the twelfth century
and was re-interpreted (and partially misrepresented) in the context of the Christian
scholastic heritage. Greek sources reached Italy after the fall of Byzantium.
The second presupposed historical foundation is the humanistic rejection of these
misunderstandings and not-understandings along with a critical turn against the
literary tradition of the Middle Ages and the rejection of a large part of the tradition
of the Catholic Church in the Reformation. The humanists of the Renaissance
rediscovered the classical discipline of philology and used it in their interpretations
of the texts of the classical literary tradition. This tool was then also used by
Protestant theologians. The final consequence was the rejection of the medieval
tradition as a tradition of the “Dark Ages.”
One of the essential side effects of this new attitude toward the past in the Renais-
sance was an interest in forgotten, partially destroyed, and buried monuments,
i.e., the architecture and the arts of Classical Antiquity, and their recognition as
standards of beauty and humanity. This interest was the first step in the development
of classical archaeology as an academic discipline. Given philology and classical
archaeology as disciplines, the history of Classical Antiquity could be established
as a discipline, a field of research. Philology and archaeology not only provided
the material for the new historical understanding and reconstruction of the history
of Classical Antiquity, but they offered the methodical standards both for the re-
discovery of forgotten and not-understood texts and monuments and for eliminating
not-understanding and misunderstanding in their interpretation.

6
For a detailed account see Seebohm 2004, §2, 21f.
68 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

The experience of the past as a past present that has become foreign to one’s own
present tradition in its fixed life expressions can be iterated. A significant iteration
of this attitude of hermeneutical and historical consciousness was the rediscovery of
the culture of the Middle Ages and, as a consequence, the significance of the history
of the Dark Ages in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
The experience of what is foreign and has even been rejected and forgotten
in one’s own tradition, together with the experience of highly developed foreign
cultural lifeworlds7 in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was the
presupposition for the genesis of the historical human disciplines of philology,
archaeology, and history as sciences. The predecessor’s past understanding of
documents and monuments in the own present tradition was not only viewed with
suspicion as a mistaken representation of forgotten past cultures, and its worldviews;
the radicalized new attitude in the understanding of fixed life expressions also
implied that the understanding of the past in the present can be (but is not
necessarily) distorted by misunderstanding, and the task was to correct such
misunderstandings.8 This attitude demanded a methodologically guided critique of
pre-given interpretations.
The final arbiter of critique for the Enlightenment was reason. The task of human
reason was to criticize the truth claims of the tradition, i.e., to distinguish between
irrational, superstitious truth claims and rational truth claims that have been helpful
and significant for the progress of human reason in history. Prima facie this idea of
critique is and was not compatible with the attitude of the philological-historical dis-
ciplines. It was a critique and in many cases an at least partial rejection. of past cul-
tural traditions from the viewpoint of the present, and in this sense was a-historical.
For the historical human disciplines critique was not a critique of what was
or had happened in the past, but a critique of the understanding of the sources
in the pre-given tradition, including past interpretations of the sources within the
human studies themselves. An evaluation of the truth claims of the sources, i.e., the
question of possible applications or rejections, was not of interest in their field of
research. The task was to interpret the sources of past and present foreign cultures
and their historical development in their own context. The slogan was: all cultures
are “immediate to God.” Their life expressions have their value in themselves
and ought not to be judged from the outside. This universal and methodically
radical turn “back to the sources” was understood by the contemporaries as a turn
against the Enlightenment, and as a defense of the truth, beauty, and virtue of
the world of Classical Antiquity or the Middle Ages, or even the cultures and the
traditions of present subcultures. The achievements of the human studies in history,
philology, and archaeology have been used in the critique of the Enlightenment by
the romanticists and German idealists. But in spite of what Gadamer says about the

7
First China in the seventeenth century and then India.
8
Schleiermacher 1959. The original version of his lectures on hermeneutics of 1809/10, only
published in 1985, is the first hermeneutics that can be considered as a methodology of philology
as a science.
4.1 The Emergence of the Human Sciences in the European Tradition 69

romanticism of Dilthey,9 romanticism and traces of the influence of philosophical

idealism gradually vanished in the further development of the historical human
sciences of the nineteenth century. Historical positivism (and later historicism)
was the guiding ideology of the historical disciplines. Seen with hindsight, their
idea of critique, understood from the methodological point of view, had some
essential features in common with the Enlightenment. The methodology of the
historical human sciences implied the demand for a radical critique of the tradition
of interpretations of past cultures, of their texts and their monuments, including
interpretations that already followed the methodological guidelines of research in
the historical sciences.
In his Enzyclopaedie und Methodenlehre der philologischen Wissenschaften,10
the methodologist Boeckh already distinguished between lower grammatical
hermeneutics and critique and higher hermeneutics and critique. Grammatical
critique has to decide the question whether or not seen from the grammatical and in
general linguistic point of view the sources have been corrupted in the course of the
tradition, and, if corrupted, how these corruptions can be removed. Higher critique
has to decide whether the pre-given interpretations of the sources are appropriate,
i.e., whether they are compatible with the context to which they belong. According
to Droysen’s Historik,11 higher critique asks whether the material of methodically
interpreted sources is sufficient or insufficient for the reconstruction of the past in
its totality.
The existence of these new disciplines had consequences. First, not only
classical philologists (and later philologists of other languages and literatures)
but also historians and archaeologists received chairs at universities. Very soon
these disciplines were called sciences, e.g., the “science of classical antiquity”
(Altertumswissenschaft). Humanistic disciplines and later also the studies of foreign
cultures in general had already been recognized as respectable academic disciplines
since the sixteenth century. The question why and how the claim of these disciplines
to be sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) can be justified was raised in the nineteenth
century. It was an urgent question because the generally accepted assumption of
the time was already that the methodology of the natural sciences is the ideal
paradigm for the recognition of other disciplines as sciences. The problem lurked
in the background of academic teaching and research in Germany after the reform
of the German universities by Wilhelm von Humboldt. In the beginning, this was
a problem for the historical human sciences. It was only in the second half of the
nineteenth century that it dawned on some that the social sciences might have more
in common with the historical human sciences than with the natural sciences.

9
Gadamer 1965, I.1.a.
10
Boeckh 1966. These lectures were given before the middle of the nineteenth century and were
1886. For other significant hermeneuticists of the nineteenth century, see Seebohm 2004, §8.
11
Droysen 1977. Droysen’s booklet Grundriss der Historik was nothing more that a short guideline
for the students of his lectures. The lectures themselves and other material were not available before
the critical edition of his works in 1977.
70 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

4.2 Dilthey’s and Rickert’s System of the Sciences

The proposal of Dilthey and Rickert to solve the problem with the aid of a strict
separation between the natural and the human sciences is not without difficulties.
Some have been already mentioned in the last part of Chap. 3, but the main problem
left was and is that the separation is not a sufficient answer to the question why
and in what sense the human sciences can be called sciences if they are not able
to apply the methodological guidelines of the natural sciences. It was a crucial
question because in the nineteenth century positivism was already an influential
rival of Dilthey’s and Rickert’s proposal. The main question was and still is why
and how it is possible to defend the claim that the disciplines of the humanities are
not only of significance for the arts, for erudition, and for prudence in politics and
the giving and application of laws but can also be recognized as empirical sciences.
August Comte invented the term “positivism” for his philosophy, a philosophy
that recognized only the methods of modern science as warrants of truth. Mill
adopted the term and used it for his own system, and it is his system, not the
system of Comte, that was of basic significance for the further development of the
positivistic theory of the sciences in general, and especially of the human sciences
as sciences that are able to apply the methods that have been developed in the natural
sciences to the “sciences of the mind.”
John Stuart Mill developed a unified system of the sciences that treated the
human sciences, in his terms the “sciences of the mind” or “moral sciences,” as a
branch in the last part of his system. The common ground of science is experience,
understood in terms of the tradition of empiricism. The warrant for the objective
validity of the sciences is formal and inductive logic.12 An essential part of inductive
logic was a theory of the logic of experiments as a methodology for the justification
or rejection of hypotheses, their verification and falsification. Mill’s reflections on
political, social, and economic theories and the theory of the law and last but not
least history have been and are still of outstanding significance. The natural sciences
represented the new paradigm of what can count as a science and what cannot.
According to John Stuart Mill the “sciences of the mind” and associated disciplines
have to use the methods of the natural sciences.
Mill was nevertheless of significance for Dilthey’s system of the human sciences.
Dilthey never challenged Mill’s theory of the natural sciences. He also recognized
with Mill that psychology is the methodological foundation for all other human
sciences. More about Mill’s influence and its limits will be said in Part IV,
Sects. 10.1 and 10.3. For Dilthey psychology as understanding and analyzing
psychology was also an empirical science, but it is neither necessary nor possible
to apply inductive methods of experimental research of the natural sciences in
psychological research and in general in empirical research in the human sciences.

12
Mill 1977 (1st first ed. 1843).
4.2 Dilthey’s and Rickert’s System of the Sciences 71

According to Wilhelm Dilthey, the natural sciences and human sciences have
different goals. The aim of the natural sciences is to explain, the aim of the human
sciences is to understand.13 Heinrich Rickert distinguished between the nomothetic
natural sciences interested in the universal laws of nature and the ideographic
cultural sciences interested in descriptions of individuals in the broadest sense,
including individual persons, events, works of art, worldviews, and cultures in his
Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft.14 Both Dilthey’s system and the Neo-
Kantian system introduced a strict epistemological opposition between the human
or cultural sciences and the natural sciences.15
The basic epistemological principles guiding the separation of the natural and
the human sciences in Dilthey and Rickert are compatible. According to Dilthey
the natural sciences are interested in causal explanations, but causal explanations
presuppose the discovery of causal laws. They are, hence, according to Rickert,
nomothetic, they posit laws. Discoveries of causal laws presuppose the methodology
of Mill’s inductive logic, the logic of experiment and observation. The basic
category of the epistemology and methodology of the human or cultural sciences
is, according to Dilthey, descriptive and analyzing understanding. The goal of
understanding is to understand individual life expressions, i.e., the human sciences
or cultural sciences are, as Rickert said, ideographic, descriptions of what is
individual and unique in the broadest sense: individual persons, events, works of
art, worldviews, and cultures.
This distinction was challenged by the positivists of the nineteenth century and
later by the analysts. According to the positivists (following Mill’s epistemology)
and later the analysts a discipline is a science if and only if the discipline is able
to apply the same (or at least similar) methodological rules and principles that
are applied in the natural sciences. The final answer of the analysts is that human
sciences are sciences only because they are able either to find causal explanations for
facts and to discover causal laws justifying the explanations or to apply causal laws
and theories provided by the natural sciences in their explanations. This problem

13
Dilthey GS I; SW I; Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1883.
14
Rickert 1926, (1st ed. 1899), English ed. 1962.
15
The term “sciences of the mind” but also “moral sciences” of J. S. Mill’s Logic of 1843
was given in German translations of his works as Geisteswissenschaften. It is difficult to decide
whether the Hegelian tradition had an influence on the translation. The editors of the American
translation of Dilthey’s works decided to translate Geisteswissenschaften with the term “human
sciences.” Schutz, following Rickert, sometimes preferred Kulturwissenschaften, cultural sciences.
From the epistemological point of view, this term has the advantage of avoiding the metaphysical
connotations of the term “Geist” but also of connotations of “human” as a predicate used in terms
for branches of the natural sciences or the technological application of natural sciences, e.g., in
medical technologies. The terminology of the following investigations will use “human sciences”
because it is not advisable to “deconstruct” systems of already established terminological traditions
in the sciences.
72 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

will be considered in detail in Sect. 6.1 below. Understanding, interpretation etc.

are more or less respectable mental activities like writing poetry, but “disciplines”
relying on such activities are not sciences.16
The classification of the human sciences by Dilthey introduced the distinc-
tion between the historical human sciences, including history, philology, and
archaeology, and the systematic human sciences, including psychology, sociology,
economics, and jurisprudence.17 Psychology, though it is prima facie only one of
the systematic human sciences among others, is of basic significance for Dilthey’s
epistemology. Psychology is a human science, and its first epistemological category
is, therefore, understanding and not causal explanation. According to the second
epistemological principle, psychology does not admit causal explanations because
its method is pure description. The third principle is that psychology is a descriptive
and analyzing (zergliedernde) science and this implies that psychology is not
only interested in the ideographic understanding of individuals, but also in the
analysis of the general structures of understanding. But if so, then psychology
provides the basic methodical guidelines for a general theory of understanding,
i.e., methodological principles for the other systematic human sciences and for the
historical human sciences.
However, both Dilthey’s strict separation of the human and the natural sciences
and his distinction between the historical and the systematic human sciences
have weak spots. The case of psychology already causes difficulties, for Dilthey
psychology was understanding psychology, and in this sense it is a human science.
But psychology was also descriptive psychology, and descriptive psychology has
been used as a preparatory discipline for experimental research with the goal of
this research being the discovery of causal laws. Thus descriptive psychology can
be of significance for understanding in the human science, but it can also be
of significance for psychology as a natural science. It also has to be taken into
account that human behavior is in some respects similar to animal behavior and
can be considered as an object of the life sciences. Psychology is in this sense an
extension of the life sciences, more precisely of animal psychology, and, therefore,
of the natural sciences. Clinical psychiatry has always used the methods and results
of physiological research. It is, furthermore, questionable whether predictions,

16
Even today some could be inclined to consider the thesis that the human sciences would not
cease to be respectable disciplines if they had their proper place in a faculty of the humanities.
This would be a new type of “lower faculty,” and the “higher faculties” would be the faculties
of the natural sciences, i.e., physics, chemistry, biology, and, perhaps, because of its applied
mathematics, economics. There is no doubt that naturalists, analytic philosophers, and some
scientists assume that precisely this is the status of the “Faculty of the Liberal Arts” especially
in American universities. Given the influence of Dilthey and others in the development of the
Geisteswissenschaften, such considerations are less influential in the battle of the “two cultures” in
continental Europe.
17
Schutz replaced Dilthey’s term “systematic human sciences” with “social sciences”; cf. also
Sect. 4.3 below.
4.3 Critical Remarks About the Traditional Division Between the Natural. . . 73

causal explanations, and discoveries of causal connections will never occur in

descriptive and understanding psychology as well as in the other human sciences.
The social sciences use methods that are similar to the methods of the natural
sciences. The methods of statistical causal research and its epistemological prob-
lems surface in the life sciences, but also in the systematic and even in the historical
human sciences. The historical human sciences apply techniques and viewpoints
borrowed from the natural sciences, especially in archaeology and paleontology.18
Causal explanations can be found in history and are of central significance for
the epistemology of history. Not only psychology, but also the other systematic
sciences, especially economics, are interested in the discovery of causal connections
and deliver reliable predictions for comparatively small social contexts.
The position of positivism and later analytic philosophy is, hence, prima facie at
least in part convincing, especially in the systematic human sciences and first of all
in psychology, but also, e.g., in economics. The difficult cases for this positivism are
the historical human sciences. Causal explanations following the logic of implicative
conditionals are rare in the historical disciplines and can be easily challenged by
critical historical research.19 To the best of my knowledge, nobody has even tried
to explicate the methods of philological interpretations of, e.g., Genesis, the Iliad,
Hesiod, or the New Testament with methods borrowed from the theory of science
of the analysts. The epistemological attempts of analytic philosophy in this respect
will be reviewed in Part II. The review is necessary because the phenomenological
analysis of the general structures of pre-scientific lifeworlds has shown that causal
conditions and predictions are essential aspects of elementary understanding and
that the idea of causal laws and strict determinism can be an essential aspect of
higher understanding. In the last instance, these sciences always presuppose human
encounters, either between the researcher and the person or group of persons as
objects of research or the observed encounters of persons. But such encounters
presuppose understanding.

4.3 Critical Remarks About the Traditional Division

Between the Natural and the Human Sciences

The task of this and the next section is to give a survey of the problems, but not
yet of possible solutions, of Dilthey’s and Rickert’s strict separation of the human
and the natural sciences. The reasoning for the separation of both Dilthey as well
as Rickert used epistemological categories. The problem is that neither Dilthey nor
Rickert mentioned a general epistemological criterion for the distinction between a
discipline and a science that covers the human as well as the natural sciences. It can
be admitted that understanding is the basic epistemological category for the human

18
Cf. Part IV, Sect. 9.1.
19
See Sect. 6.2 below.
74 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

disciplines while nevertheless denying that they can be recognized as empirical

sciences. Mill’s positivism has shown that the natural sciences are sciences because
their methods are able to distinguish between hypotheses about causal laws that can
be accepted as true and others that must be rejected. The human disciplines are hon-
orable disciplines, disciplines of arts in the old sense of Classical Antiquity along
with philological and historical scholarship interested in ideographic understanding
of historical and presently living persons, cultural monuments, historical events,
etc. Humanistic studies and scholarship are respectable disciplines because they are
useful for the improvement of the moral and cultural progress of human mankind,
but they cannot be recognized as sciences.
A final decision whether a strict separation of the natural and the human sciences
is acceptable thus presupposes an epistemological justification for their claim to
be sciences. Rickert’s thesis about the nature of the human sciences presupposes
the Neo-Kantian version of Kant’s practical philosophy, the Neo-Kantian theory
of moral and other values. Dilthey’s approach is different and of immediate sig-
nificance for the development of a phenomenological epistemology. After reading
Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Dilthey agreed with Husserl’s arguments against
naturalistic psychologism in the first volume and with the phenomenological
solutions for the problems of the ideal objects of logic in the second volume. He
even characterized his own methodological approach in psychology and the human
sciences as phenomenology.20 Offended by Husserl’s attack in “Philosophy as a
Rigorous Science” against historicism as another type of relativism,21 he started a
correspondence with Husserl. In his later manuscripts Husserl recognized Dilthey’s
psychology as a phenomenological psychology in his sense and Dilthey’s project
of a universal human science as an immediate predecessor of his transcendental
phenomenology.22 Prima facie this Husserlian appraisal of Dilthey’s work includes
Dilthey’s distinction of the natural from the human sciences. However, Husserl’s
epistemological arguments for the separation in the Crisis are not compatible with
Dilthey’s reasoning.
Nature as an object of the natural sciences presupposes an application of mathesis
universalis to the exact essences of time, space, and matter. The categorial structure
of the world as sum total of objects of the natural sciences also implies, hence,
the mathematical idealization of causality. The thesis of naturalism is that the
nature of the natural sciences is the objective true world behind the lifeworld or, in
Kantian jargon, the world of things themselves discovered by the sciences behind the

20
Cf. Makkreel 1975, 59–73, 274–279; Seebohm 1985a, 99, 103 and also 1987, 26f.
21
Hua XXV.
22
Hua IX, Phänomenologische Psychologie, Beilage III, 1926 on Dilthey’s psychology and II,
1928 on Dilthey and the human sciences, 354–364. Grünewald’s critique of Dilthey’s conception of
psychology and psychology as the foundation of the human sciences (Grünewald 2009, 180–182,
cf. 118) is not compatible with Husserl’s evaluation of Dilthey’s position in his later manuscripts
and lectures. On Husserl’s evaluation of Dilthey’s psychology as a path to transcendental
phenomenology see Ströker 1987 chapter VI. On Dilthey’s influence on Husserl’s evaluation of
the historical human sciences see Seebohm 1985a, 1987, and 2013.
4.3 Critical Remarks About the Traditional Division Between the Natural. . . 75

lifeworld as a world of appearances. Seen from the viewpoint of phenomenological

reflection, this objective true world is the residuum of an abstractive idealizing
reduction. The abstraction brackets the generative priority of the experience of
reality in the concrete lifeworld and with it essential aspects of the real objects in
the lifeworld.23
The empirical basis of the natural sciences in the lifeworld is the natural
environment and only the natural environment, i.e., the natural sciences bracket
all ethical, aesthetic, and moral values, all purposes and actions, goals of actions,
etc., of objects in the world as the sum total of objects in a cultural lifeworld.
The Neo-Kantian thesis that what is in brackets for the natural sciences are only
those values and actions realizing values that are the empirical basis of the cultural
sciences24 is misleading. Values and purposes are essential abstract moments of
concrete things and events, and states of affairs are what they are for the human
sciences in a concrete cultural lifeworld. Abstractions presuppose an empirical basis
and cannot serve as an empirical basis for a science of the lifeworld. A task of the
human sciences is to understand values as abstract aspects of a concrete historical
socio-cultural reality.
Dilthey’s thesis that the human sciences are sciences of understanding points
in the right direction; it is, however, vague and ambiguous. What is understood,
i.e., known in the broadest sense in the lifeworld, is the correlate of intersubjective
understanding. Several levels and aspects of understanding in the lifeworld have
been distinguished, and all of them share the structure of the temporal and spatial
horizons of the lifeworld. The understanding of states of affairs in the lifeworld and
its temporal structures imply, furthermore, causal relations as essential structural
moments of the experience of practical activities, of significant actions, and of
significant events in the natural environment.
Husserl’s epistemological account of the natural sciences implies, hence, a rejec-
tion of the epistemological criteria of Dilthey’s as well as of Rickert’s separation
of the natural and the human sciences. The natural sciences presuppose a idealized
mathematical concept of causality but Husserl never explicitly denied that causality
and also efficient causality is a basic categorial structure of the lifeworld as the
empirical basis of the human sciences.
Husserl’s account of the natural sciences offers, on the one hand, new perspec-
tives, but on the other hand also presents some problems for a phenomenological
epistemology of the natural sciences. A first problem is that his account of the
natural sciences is certainly applicable to theories of the “hard” sciences, physics
and chemistry, but it is questionable whether it also covers the life sciences, e.g.,
Darwin’s theory of evolution.25 A second problem is that the Crisis mentions

23
Hua VI, esp. Sects. 3.3, 8.5, and 9.1.
24
About the significance of values in the theories of the basic categories of the social and historical
human sciences in Windelband, Rickert, and Weber, cf. also Grünewald’s interpretation and
critique of the Neo-Kantian approach in Grünewald 2009, 136ff., 172.
25
More will be said about this problem see Part III, Sect. 8.5.
76 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

the distinction between theory and experimental praxis in physics along with
the significance of technology without analyzing the problems of the logic of
experiment and observation.26
The publication of the Crisis offered a new perspective for the epistemology of
the human sciences. The world as the sum total of the objects of the human sciences
is the lifeworld. The lifeworld is the generative foundation for the abstractive
reduction of the natural sciences and it is, therefore, in brackets and outside of the
domain of the abstractive reduction. The new criterion for a strict separation of the
human and the natural sciences implies some of the old problems along with some
new problems. A first problem is that not very much is said about understanding
as an epistemological category of the human sciences. The second problem is that
much is said about the lifeworld and intersubjectivity, but virtually nothing about
the epistemological problems of the methodology of the human sciences.
The preceding critical reflections indicate that the attempt to use the category of
causality and mathematical idealizations as criteria for the distinction between the
natural and the human sciences is not convincing. Causal relations are legitimate
categories for the human sciences because causal predictions and explanations are
already essential categorial structures in the lifeworld. Mathematical idealizations
are essential for the hard natural sciences, but they are only of limited significance
for the life sciences. Methods used in the life sciences can be applied in psychology
and social human sciences. What is left is a critical review of the separation
of understanding and explanation from the viewpoint of the distinctions in the
typology of understanding introduced in Sect. 3.2 above. Prima facie it seems to
be promising to assume that the human sciences are sciences of understanding and
that the causal explanations of the natural sciences cannot be characterized as a type
of understanding. Closer consideration indicates, however, that this assumption is
threatened by serious ambiguities.
Several types of understanding and life expressions and each with its signif-
icance for different aspects of the lifeworld have been distinguished: animalic
understanding, elementary understanding, and first-order higher understanding and
second-order higher understanding. First-order higher understanding is the creative
understanding of the context of the lifeworld as a whole and of partial aspects of the
lifeworld. Such aspects include structures of political power, of custom and law, of
trade relations, of intercultural contacts, of the production of goods, and last but not
least, of the natural environment. There is, on the other hand, second-order higher
understanding, the re-creative understanding of the manifestations of first-order
creative understanding in immediate and fixed life expressions, the interpretation
of life expressions.
Seen from the viewpoint of these distinctions, the human sciences are not
sciences practicing elementary understanding or first-order higher understanding. If
this were the case the human scientist would be a prophet or a poet or a lawgiver or a

26
See Hua VI, §9 g.
4.3 Critical Remarks About the Traditional Division Between the Natural. . . 77

natural scientist. These all create different types of first-order higher understanding.
The understanding practiced in the human sciences is re-creative second-order
higher understanding. They are “interpreters” of the life expressions of Others. To
call the humanistic disciplines sciences of understanding without adding that the
understanding of the human sciences is a secondary understanding that can be called
interpretation if it is a methodologically guided secondary understanding leads to
absurd consequences.
The correlate of understanding is the lifeworld in general. If the natural “sci-
ences” were to bracket understanding including creative understanding, they would
bracket the lifeworld in general. The first absurdity is, hence, that a lifeworld with
sciences, i.e., our present lifeworld, is a contradictio in adjecto. It is absurd to
assume an abstraction from the lifeworld in its entirety that leaves the natural
sciences and their universe of objects in a nowhere outside the lifeworld. The
sciences are always sciences in a lifeworld with sciences, and this type of lifeworld
can be distinguished from genetically earlier types of pre-scientific lifeworlds. One
of the essential requirements of the method of the natural sciences is that observation
in the natural sciences has at least the potential to be intersubjectively accessible
observation. This means nothing more and nothing less than the accessibility of the
observations in the lifeworld of the natural scientists. Required for the solution of
these problems is, hence, a detailed analysis of the implications of the bracketing of
certain aspects of the lifeworld, a bracketing that determines the constitution of the
ontological region of the natural sciences, and with it the separation of the human
and the natural sciences. Some preliminary hints about these implications can be
given.
What is genetically earlier still exists on genetically later levels as a one-sidedly
founding abstract structure. Hence there must be a common ground for both the
human and the natural sciences and this common ground is the lifeworld. The
abstraction that is constitutive for the natural sciences must be understood as an
abstraction of certain essential structures of the lifeworld in general and not of the
lifeworld in general.
Natural science is a type of first-order creative understanding of the lifeworld.
Presupposing the explication of the static structures of the lifeworld in general in
Sect. 3.1, it can be said that the natural sciences are interested in the understanding
of the natural environment of the lifeworld in general and bracket all other first-
order interpretations of the lifeworld and its natural environment, e.g., in religious
revelations, metaphysical contemplations, etc. It is, therefore, a serious contender
and a challenge for other “worldviews.”
The understanding of the natural environment in systems of creative higher
understanding has, hence, its immediate foundation in the encounter with the natural
environment in elementary understanding. Elementary understanding is, therefore,
of basic significance for the explication of the foundations of the natural sciences
in the lifeworld in general. According to the analyses in Sect. 3.5 above, in the
context of encounters with the natural environment in the social lifeworld causality
is the causality of actors, and is as such always understood as a final cause. It is the
78 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

purpose of the action that guides the actions and the choice of means of the actor.
This pattern governs practical actions on the level of elementary understanding in
the encounter with the natural environment.
In addition, elementary understanding is interested in causes that can be used
as reliable means in the pursuit of the goals of practical life. Of interest is the
understanding of factors, effective causes, that produced a desired effect in the past
and support, therefore, the expectation and prediction that they will also “work”
in the future. Productive elementary understanding is in addition interested in
inventions, the discovery of new effective causes for old or new desired useful
effects. It is possible to abstract from the context of purposes of elementary
understanding in the social lifeworld. What is left after the abstraction is the pre-
scientific generative foundation for a possible development of the natural sciences
in the lifeworld in general.
The analysis of the generative foundations of the natural sciences in the lifeworld
presupposes, on the one hand, the analysis of the generation of a lifeworld
with natural sciences from pre-scientific socio-cultural lifeworlds. The analysis
presupposes, on the other hand, the epistemological analysis of the methodology
of the natural sciences. However, the static description of the foundations of the
natural sciences in the lifeworld already indicates, however, some basic structural
aspects of the analysis of the generation of the natural sciences. First of all, it is
obvious that the emergence of the natural sciences presupposes the generation of a
cultural lifeworld with a literary tradition and a developed system of literary genres.
Of significance in this context is, secondly, a tradition of studies in geometry and
arithmetic (in phenomenological terms, of the study of mathematical exact essences)
and the application of such studies on the level of elementary understanding.27
The foundation of the humanistic disciplines and then the human sciences
in the lifeworld in general is secondary higher understanding, the interpretation
of the immediate or fixed life expressions life expressions of Others including
consociates, foreign contemporaries, and predecessors. The horizon within which
life expressions of predecessors are of interest for interpretation is the horizon of the
interpretation of the tradition of the lifeworld. Immediate life expressions, including
actions on the level of elementary and higher understanding, need interpretation
if and only if they are not understood or after the discovery that successful
communications have been distorted by misunderstanding.
The first stumbling block for a further explication of the foundations of the
human sciences in the lifeworld is the ambiguity of elementary and higher under-
standing, on the one hand, and of first-order and second-order understanding,
interpretation, on the other. If they are lumped together, the outcome will be what
can be called interpretationism or hermeneuticism, the night of the analysis of
understanding in which all cats are grey. The second stumbling block is a strict
separation between the social or systematic and the historical human sciences.

27
The lever was a useful tool before discovering the law of the lever. Gunpowder was used before
the natural sciences explained how it was used in guns and rockets. Detailed explications of the
generative foundations of the possible emergence of the natural sciences will be given in Part III.
4.4 Critical Remarks About the System of the Human Sciences. . . 79

4.4 Critical Remarks About the System of the Human

Sciences in Rickert, Dilthey, and Schutz

Dilthey’s distinction between the systematic and the historical human sciences
should not be understood as a taxonomic distinction between two classes of
sciences. The sciences in such systems of classification, e.g., as science of art,
state, society, and religion, etc., are “fog-banks that obstruct our view of reality.”28
Understanding in all of them requires that they are understood as aspects of socio-
cultural reality as a whole. The investigation of the external organization of a
society is the task of all the systematic human sciences: law, economics, and
ethics.29 The historical experience of individuals is the point where all of the aspects
of external organizations intersect. The systematic human sciences are, hence, a
necessary extension of the historical human sciences in Dilthey’s system. History
is in the center of the human sciences, and understanding in history presupposes
the understanding of the individual. Through their intersections, psychic unities
develop the lasting social structures, and through these the progress of history.
Descriptive psychology is, therefore, presupposed in all human sciences.30 Apart
from his reflections on hermeneutics,31 Dilthey’s reflections on the human sciences
ought not to be understood as an epistemology of the human sciences. The short
last chapter of book I of his Introduction emphasizes the necessity of a future
epistemological foundation for the human sciences that is still a desideratum.32
Not much about the distinction between the historical and the systematic or social
human sciences can be found in Husserl. It can be assumed that he expected that
Schutz would provide the phenomenology of the social world. Schutz distinguished
the social human sciences and the historical human sciences.33 His approach has
the advantage of offering not only a phenomenological analysis of the social world,
but also some steps toward a theory of science (Wissenschaftslehre) for the social
sciences that will be considered in Part IV, especially in Sect. 10.4,34 but not
much is said about an epistemology of empirical research in the social sciences.
His phenomenological descriptions include the dimension of predecessors as a

28
Dilthey GS 1, book I. ch. 11, 93.
29
Ethics in the context of the human sciences is not understood as a philosophical discipline. What
is meant are the customs distinguishing between right and wrong, good and bad, within the context
of a certain socio-cultural lifeworld.
30
See for instance GS 1, SW 1, book 1, ch. 7–13. For a comprehensive account see Makkreel 1975,
part I.1, esp. 55f, 63–72.
31
For a detailed account see. Sects. 5.2 and 5.3 below.
32
Dilthey GS 1; SW 1, book I, ch. 19. Dilthey praised Husserl’s LI II. Husserl offered what he
was looking for: a system of logic including a theory of the whole and the parts that could be
presupposed in the human sciences.
33
Embree 2009d, section 1.
34
See esp. Sect. 10.4 on ideal types and the postulate of adequacy of phenomenological descrip-
tions.
80 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

structural aspect of the social life-world.35 He mentions history and also occa-
sionally hermeneutics in remarks about the application of the law in jurisprudence.
There are references to Dilthey but he said nothing about the phenomenology of the
historical world.36 History appears in Schutz as an extension of the social sciences.
A summary of basic problems concerning the system of the human sciences can
serve as a preliminary exposition of the investigations of Part II and Part IV of this
investigation.
The first problem is the status of psychology, its relation to the human sciences
in general and then especially to the social sciences. A superficial survey already
reveals differences and disagreements. For Dilthey but also for Schutz psychology
is of central significance for the human sciences. For Dilthey, however, psychology
as understanding psychology is as individual psychology of significance for the
understanding of immediate and of fixed life expressions in the systematic as well
as in the historical human sciences. For Schutz psychology is neither empirical
psychology nor a descriptive psychology interested in the individual as the point of
intersection of the aspects of socio-historical reality. He understood his psychology
as phenomenological psychology in Husserl’s sense, and Husserl’s psychology is
indeed the guiding thread for Schutz’s phenomenological psychological reflections
preparing the analysis of the structures of the social world.37
Thus compared with Dilthey’s approach, Schutz’s psychology must be char-
acterized as social psychology. Whatever is of interest for psychology is also of
significance for the structures of the social world and vice versa.38 The problem
of the status of psychology was also central for the controversy between Schutz
and Gurwitsch after 1940 that will be considered in the next section, because this
discussion is also of significance for the epistemic interpretation of phenomenology
and for a phenomenological epistemology.
A second problem is that according to Shutz the social sciences include the past
horizon of the immediate present in lived experience, but also, beyond that, the
dimension of predecessors in a distant past and, therefore, the historical dimension.
Conversely, for Dilthey the historical reproduction of the past cultural lifeworld
is the presupposition of understanding the law system, the structures of political
power, the economic situation, and other social systems in the present. It is possible
to show that this opposition can be understood as an opposition between two
correlated perspectives on a shared common region of objects. Some preliminary
considerations can prepare the analyses in Part II and Part IV.

35
See Schutz 1932, part 4, section (E) “The World of Predecessors and the Problem of History.”
36
See Embree 2008b; 2010a about Schutz on hermeneutics, the historical human sciences, cultural
science in general, and Schutz’s relation to Dilthey.
37
See Schutz 1932, parts 2 and 3; cf. Embree 2008a; Embree 2009d. Schutz nowhere lists
psychology together with sociology, economy, and the law as a special discipline of the social
science and said nothing about the epistemology of psychology as an empirical science. This
problem will be considered in Part IV, Sects. 10.3 and 10.4.
38
Embree 2003.
4.4 Critical Remarks About the System of the Human Sciences. . . 81

The empirical basis of reflections on social structures start with observations of

life expressions given in the present, together with the immediate temporal horizons
of predecessors and successors in lived intersubjective experience. Life expressions
in the present can be immediate life expressions, including the observation of actions
and oral discourse but also fixed life expressions, written discourse, buildings,
towns, factories, temples, and churches. The empirical basis for historical research,
the facts for the historian, are fixed life expressions, texts and monuments of authors
in the past given in the present. The final task of comprehensive historical research
is to reconstruct the past reality of a more or less foreign lifeworld in the past with
the material of the philological and archaeological interpretations of the fixed life
expressions, texts, artifacts of elementary understanding, and monuments.
The observations of social research refer to immediate and fixed life expressions
given in the present and in the immediate past of the present but the immediate past
of the present is steadily vanishing at its fringes into the horizon of the historical
past, and for the present this past given only in fixed life expressions. The fixed life
expressions for the reconstruction of a past reality include vice versa the dimension
of the social structures of a past present in a more or less foreign cultural lifeworld.
The difference between the temporal horizons of immediate and fixed life
expressions imply the differences with which causal relations are given for the
historical and the social perspective. Expectations implied in pre-given causal
rules of elementary and higher understanding in the lifeworld can be satisfied
or disappointed in the present, and new guesses about hitherto unknown causal
relations can be disappointed or confirmed in the present. In the contrast, events in
the past only admit causal explanations of what has already happened. The historical
perspective has its empirical basis in fixed life expressions referring to what
happened in the past, and what happened in the past admits causal explanations. But
while the historical perspective admits only causal explanations, the perspective of
the social sciences includes the possibility of confirmations or disconfirmations of
predictions and, therefore, also permits the discovery of new causal rules and causal
explanations for events in the immediate past horizon of the present.
The third problem is that the system of the social sciences is not a system
of separable disciplines. The science of the law is about social phenomena and
presupposes acquaintance with other types of social phenomena, first of all with the
economy and the distribution of political power in a society. Investigations about
economic and political phenomena presuppose vice versa some knowledge of legal
structures. None of these and other aspects belonging to the context of a concrete
cultural lifeworld can be considered as an independent entity outside the context
of the social world. The explication of the structures of this context is, therefore,
relevant for the determination of the empirical basis of the social sciences.
The situation is even more complex in case of the historical human sciences.
History is not only the comprehensive historical science including the history
of political structures, of the law, of economy, of literature, religion, the arts,
and architecture. History presupposes the work of philological and archaeological
interpretations of the sources for the reconstruction of a past reality. But philol-
ogy and even archaeology are vice versa incomplete without research that is,
82 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

strictly speaking, historical research. The biographies of the authors of, e.g., the
literature of the past used for purposes of philological interpretations presuppose
historical investigations. In addition, archaeological discoveries and interpretations
need knowledge about the historical development in past cultural lifeworlds. Differ-
ent levels and aspects of a past socio-cultural lifeworld are of significance for the
empirical basis of the historical human sciences. Given the correlation of the social
and the historical human sciences, they are also relevant for the social sciences.
What has to be mentioned is, furthermore, that it is not the privilege of the his-
torical human sciences to discover foreign past cultural lifeworlds of predecessors
in the past. Ethnology or cultural anthropology is interested in foreign cultures of
contemporaries in the present and, hence, is a social science. Ethnology recognizes
that contemporary foreign cultures have their own foreign tradition and their own
historical horizon. Ethnology prepares the ground for new fields for historical
research. It is, furthermore, of significance that cultures, especially cultures without
a written tradition, that have been given for ethnological research in the past are now
only accessible with the aid of the methods of historical research studying not only
the fixed life expressions of the culture, but also the fixed life expressions that are
the reports of ethnologists in the past.39
The fourth problem, the problem of the inseparable unity or possible separa-
tion of interpretation and application, has been discussed almost exclusively as
a problem of hermeneutics, i.e., of philological interpretations in literature. The
interpretation of the law in jurisprudence has been mentioned as an example and
even as the prototype of the necessary unity of text interpretation and application.40
Closer considerations reveal a structure of a higher degree of complexity. A text is a
law text according to the rules of the genre of law texts if the text offers (1) a general
description of a social interaction and (2) a descriptions of a sequence of other social
interactions that ought to realized in the future if a case of the social interaction (1)
has happened in the past horizon of the present interpretation/application of the law
in a court of law. The application of the text of a law in a court of justice is, hence,
more than a recognition that the text of the law represents the tradition of truth and
justice of the cultural lifeworld. Jurists in a court of law are interested not only in
the philologically guided interpretation of laws, but also in the application of the
law to presently given cases of social interactions and in the social interactions of
the administration of justice that are required by the law and its application in the
sentences or decisions of a court of law.
Thus it follows that, presupposing the system of the human sciences of Rickert,
Dilthey, and Schutz, the problem of the unity of interpretation and application does
not emerge in the context of philological historical research; instead it emerges in
the context of interpretations in a social science that is interested in the present and in

39
Many such cultures vanished in cultural contact with cultures with a literary tradition in the first
half of the Twentieth Century.
40
Gadamer 1965, part II, II, section 2.a; for a detailed critical discussion of this thesis see Part IV,
Sect. 10.4 below.
4.4 Critical Remarks About the System of the Human Sciences. . . 83

the past only to the extent to which the past is relevant for the present. Of interest is,
therefore, how the past can be present in the decisions in court in jurisprudence, and
beyond that, in the science of the law as a social science.41 The science of the law
recognizes that the application of the law in jurisprudence presupposes the correct
interpretation of the presently valid law system, the so-called positive law, and in
addition the correct interpretation of the positive law requires the application (!) of
the results of the history of the development of the law system and its applications,
a development that culminates in the presently applied system of the positive law.
The history of the law is a branch of the historical human disciplines and is
interested in a past that is present only in fixed life expressions of authors in the
past. Jurists interpreting the positive law that has to be applied here and now have
to presuppose results of the research in the history of the law. Judges and lawyers
in court are, hence, interested in the interpretation of the law, but first of all in
the application of the law to certain cases in the present. These cases are presently
known in a court of law in the understanding of immediate life expressions given in
the present or of fixed life expressions by authors in the past horizon of the living
present. The “science of law” is, hence, a social science, but it presupposes the
history of law, philologically guided interpretations of law texts that ought not to
be applied in the present because they do not belong to the present system of the
positive law. They belong to a positive law that has been applied in the past but
ought not to be applied in the present.
This problem is, however, not only a problem for the science of law. It also
surfaces in theology and practical philosophy, and it will be shown in Part IV
of this investigation that it is also a problem for economics and political science
as empirical sciences as well. The problem of the relation of interpretation and
application in jurisprudence indicates, hence, a general problem for attempts to
analyze the differences and the relations between the historical and the social
sciences.
What has been said up until now already indicates that here too the generalized
problem of the necessary unity or possible separation of interpretation and appli-
cation in the social sciences can be reduced to the problem of the intersubjective
temporal structures that are of significance both for the distinction between the
historical and social or systematic human sciences and for their interdependencies.
A short recapitulation of the main viewpoints mentioned in Sects. 3.4 and 4.1 are
of interest for a critical review of these difficulties and their significance for the
possibility of a separation of interpretation and application.
Cultural traditions have been called “archaic” in Sect. 3.4 if they are not able
to separate interpretation and application. Archaic living traditions representing the
past of a cultural lifeworld for the present of this cultural lifeworld can survive
only if they are applied in the present of this cultural lifeworld. The center of

41
What can be given is only a first glance at the problem that plagues the distinction between the
historical and the human sciences. A detailed analysis of this will be given in Sects. 10.6 and 10.7
below.
84 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

the horizons of intersubjective time is the living present of consociates. The past
horizon of intersubjective time is the horizon of predecessors and the predecessors
of predecessors, the “authors” of the tradition that represents the past in the present.
The original expectation in the present is that the successors will and ought to
follow the tradition. The consequence is that smaller or larger parts of the tradition
can be rejected and then be forgotten in the past of an archaic cultural lifeworld.
The unity of interpretation and application/rejection of the contents of the tradition
is, therefore, of central significance for the “survival” of archaic non-literary and
literary traditions. To defend the unity and truth of the tradition is the task of
professional interpreters of the tradition, but it is also their task to determine which
parts of the tradition must be rejected as false.
The lifeworld has not only temporal dimensions, but it has also spatial dimen-
sions. The spatial dimension in the present distinguishes life expressions of
consociates, contemporaries belonging to one’s own lifeworld and its tradition and
contemporary foreigners belonging to other foreign concrete lifeworlds with other
traditions. This dimension is the dimension of cultural encounters between different
lifeworlds. It is, hence, also the task of professional interpreters to determine what
can be tolerated and what must be rejected in encounters with foreign cultural
lifeworlds and their traditions within one’s own tradition.
The accumulation of texts representing the literature of authors of past periods
of one’s own literary tradition along with the literature of foreign traditions that has
been imported through intercultural encounters in the past horizon of the present,
can reach a critical phase in developed literary traditions. The truth claims of sets of
texts that are still present as fixed life expressions can be rejected but the rejection
requires interpretations, and in this case interpretations of texts and traditions that
cannot be applied. Beyond that there can be situations in which different opposed
partial traditions that apply/reject different parts of the tradition belong to one and
the same present complex literary tradition. The original necessity of the unity of
interpretation and application is dissolved if such situations are themselves parts of
a literary tradition for interpreters of texts belonging to this tradition in the present.
The sketch of the structures of such developments in Sect. 4.1 indicated that
the historical distance between the present of interpreters and the authors of texts
in the past belonging to such situations is the immediate generative foundation for
a possible separation between the interpretations and applications/rejections of the
truth claims of texts in the historical human sciences. The problem of the unity of
interpretation and application is in such situations only a problem for texts that are of
immediate significance and have to be applied in practical social interactions in the
present such as law texts in jurisprudence. The problem is, hence, a serious problem
not for the historical but for the social human sciences.42
The social sciences and psychology can, however, rely on other methodological
criteria that warrant objective validity, criteria that are not available for the historical

42
More about this problem in the next section and in Sect. 10.4 below.
4.5 An Outline of the Basic Problems of a Phenomenological Epistemology. . . 85

human sciences. Research in the social sciences and psychology has its empirical
basis in observations of events given in the present and the immediate past of the
present. Such observations can serve as the antecedents in hypothetical assumptions,
i.e., conditionals referring to causal connections with predictions of future events in
the consequents that have the potential to be tested in quasi-experimental tests and
can then be applied in explanations and predictions. Though the social sciences are
sciences of understanding and not under the abstractive reduction that is constitutive
for the natural sciences, they nevertheless share basic methodological criteria that
warrant objective validity with the natural sciences.

4.5 An Outline of the Basic Problems of a Phenomenological

Epistemology of the Empirical Sciences

One of the consequences of the ontic interpretation of the transcendental-

phenomenological reduction, and with it the absolute ontological priority of a
transcendental ego mentioned in Sect. 2.2, is that the claim of the empirical sciences
and especially the natural sciences to offer theories about “how things really are”
and to have ontological significance in this sense is void. Husserl preferred the
ontic understanding of the transcendental phenomenological reduction, but other
phenomenologists, first of all Alfred Schutz, preferred an interpretation of the
reduction that has the lifeworld as its residuum, and understood phenomenological
research as reflective analyses of the structures of the lifeworld. In this medium the
lifeworld is experienced as the real world.
According to what has been said in Sect. 3.1, the encounter with reality in
the lifeworld is immediately implied in the encounter with the hyletic field as
correlate and foundation for all passive and active intentional acts and syntheses.
The empirical sciences emerge in the pre-given lifeworld as specific cogitative
types belonging to the level of higher understanding, but this implies that they
have their one-sided generative foundation in the encounter with the brute reality
of the lifeworld of elementary understanding. It is the immediate experience of
this brute reality, which is genetically earlier and still present in all the different
interpretations of this brute reality in different cultural contexts, that is constitutive
for the recognition of the independence of this reality in the encounter with the
natural environment in all human cultures. It is, furthermore, this experience, this
feeling of this reality that transcends all interpretations, that is constitutive for
the recognition of transcendence in pre-philosophical and pre-scientific religious
“worldviews.”
Given the strict opposition between these two opposed types of understanding
the transcendental phenomenological reduction and its residuum, it is advisable
to start with first steps toward a phenomenological epistemology with a critical
reconsideration of the two alternative ontic interpretations of the phenomenological
reduction in the phenomenological movement after Husserl. The understanding of
86 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

phenomenology in Schutz has been challenged by Gurwitsch.43 It is, hence, possible

to start the critical reconsiderations with a survey of the viewpoint of an epistemic
interpretation of the transcendental phenomenological reduction beginning with a
summary of the main viewpoints of this controversy.
For Schutz phenomenology is not a transcendental phenomenology that implies
transcendental idealism. Instead it is a mundane phenomenology and the phe-
nomenological reduction can be understood as a psychological-phenomenological
reduction. Phenomenological psychology for Schutz is not only the phenomeno-
logical foundation for psychology as a human science, is in addition the phe-
nomenological analysis of the constitution of intersubjectivity and its objective
correlate, the lifeworld, and only for this reason the foundation for an epistemology
of the empirical social sciences as well. Seen from a systematic point of view,
however, his position is ambiguous because for Schutz psychology is also social
psychology, and as such an appendix of sociology as an empirical science. The
phenomenological analysis of the structures of the lifeworld has priority over
the analyses of phenomenological psychology. A systematic explication of this
ambiguity together with references will be offered below in Sects. 10.2 and 10.5.
1. According to Schutz, all problems connected with the phenomenological reduc-
tion bracketing the world and admitting only pure consciousness as its residuum
are irrelevant for a phenomenological Wissenschaftslehre, theory of science,
of the human sciences because (1.a) The reflections of a phenomenological
psychology are, as reflections on the natural lifeworld given in direct intention
sufficient for the distinction between the natural and the social sciences; (1.b) the
constitutive phenomenology of the lifeworld given in direct intention is sufficient
for the epistemological theory of the human sciences; and (1.c) phenomenolog-
ical psychology as social psychology is the epistemological foundation for the
social sciences, and it covers everything that is relevant and can be said about
members of a social world as individual subjects.
2. Following Gurwitsch and Cairns it can be said on the contrary that (2.a) the
subject matter of a phenomenological psychology as a mundane phenomenology
is first of all the living body as a psychosomatic unity and then given as the
psychosomatic unity in the lifeworld; (2.b) the analyses of the structures of con-
sciousness of pure phenomenology in the phenomenological attitude are as such
of significance for a mundane phenomenological psychology and not vice versa;
and (2.c) the analysis of the givenness and the formal and material structures of
the lifeworld presupposes the analysis of the givenness and the structures of the
sphere of ownness, the primordial sphere.44 Finally (2.d), one additional problem
must be mentioned, the problem of the epistemological status of ideal objects.

43
What is called here the Schutz-Gurwitsch controversy is only one aspect in the context of
their discussions. Of significance is also the problem of thematic relevancy and ego-relevancy,
cf. Embree 1977; 1988a, 2003; 2009b, 237f.
44
In other words: the egological reduction is a special aspect of the phenomenological reduction,
see Sect. 2.4 above.
4.5 An Outline of the Basic Problems of a Phenomenological Epistemology. . . 87

The theories of the natural sciences presuppose the phenomenological justifica-

tion for the givenness of formalized mathematical essences and exact material
essences. The theories of the socio-cultural sciences presuppose ideal types, i.e.,
the categorial structures of material essences. Science presupposes, hence, ideal
objects in general as necessary implements of scientific theories. But the domain
of possible objects given in the phenomenological attitude is according to (1)
restricted to the social lifeworld with social psychology as a basic discipline.
The restriction of phenomenology to a mundane phenomenology of the social
lifeworld once again invites psychologistic or sociologistic interpretations of
ideal objects.45
Schutz and others rejected the transcendental phenomenological reduction
because they rejected the idealistic, almost Fichtean, consequences of the ontic
interpretation of the transcendental phenomenological reduction in the Cartesian
Meditations, an interpretation that has been considered above in Sect. 2.4.
Presupposing, on the contrary, the epistemic interpretation of the transcendental-
phenomenological reduction and the phenomenological attitude, it is correct to
say with (1.b) that the social lifeworld is given in direct intention for subjective
consciousness as an intersubjectively given transcendent social world. This whole
context is, however, given for the phenomenological attitude in oblique intention as
the universal structure of the social lifeworld.
This takes care of the first problem of the controversy, i.e., (1.a) versus (2.a)
and (2.b), concerning the question whether the sphere of ownness is a necessary
structural aspect of the participating subjects as psychosomatic unities, living
bodies, in the social world or not. Presupposing the epistemic interpretation, the
sphere of ownness can be discovered with the aid of the egological and the
primordial reduction as the genetic foundation for all higher levels of active
intentional and intersubjectively determined consciousness. But as mentioned above
in Sect. 3.1, these reductions are implied as correlates of abstractive reductions
within the residuum of the universal transcendental-phenomenological reduction.
The epistemic interpretation of the phenomenological reduction is, hence, able to
deal with the problem of psychologism or sociologism in epistemological reflections
on the human sciences (2.d). Epistemological reflections on the natural as well as
the social sciences have to use independent phenomenological reflections on the
givenness of formal and material essences and their application in the empirical
sciences. In addition they have to presuppose phenomenological reflections on the
static and genetic constitution of the structures of experience in the lifeworld on the
level of pre-predicative passive synthesis and the structures of sensual experience.
According to the Logical Investigations phenomenological investigations offer a
general theory of knowledge, a Theorie der Erkenntnis. In the phenomenological
and Neo-Kantian tradition, but also elsewhere “epistemology” is understood in this

45
Except for some hints about Husserl’s reflections on logic, almost nothing can be found about
the methodology and epistemology of the formal sciences in Schutz.
88 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

broad sense as a term for a general theory of knowledge.46 The present investigation
is interested in “epistemology” in the narrower sense. It is a phenomenology of
scientific knowledge of the empirical sciences and their methodology as a part of
a theory of scientific knowledge in general, i.e., of a Wissenschaftslehre, theory of
science, and a theory of scientific knowledge is in turn a part of a theory of knowl-
edge in general, including the knowledge implied in elementary understanding of
practical knowledge. In contrast, a phenomenological epistemology in the broad
sense is interested in all subjective intentional acts and intersubjective activities
because all of them imply “knowledge,” understanding, of their intentional objects
as their correlates. Thus it includes the phenomenological reflections on intentional
acts and syntheses in the practical activities of elementary understanding and in
systems of first-order higher understanding such as religion, poetry, arts, etc., that
refer to practical actions and interactions.
A phenomenological theory of knowledge in the narrower sense is interested in
critical reflections on the scope and limits of pure theoretical knowledge. It can
be called a phenomenological theory of science, i.e., a Wissenschaftslehre in the
sense of Schutz. Science in this broad sense is a genus of higher understanding.
Other genera of higher understanding include contemplations of practical purposes,
e.g., religions promising salvation and fine arts promising aesthetic experiences. As
pure scientific knowledge theoretical knowledge presupposes an abstraction from
all practical purposes. In addition theoretical scientific knowledge already implies
the claim to be objectively valid knowledge.
Seen from the viewpoint of phenomenological epistemology, objective validity
is the objective correlate of intersubjective validity in principle. The term “in
principle” means that the intersubjectivity is not restricted to the relative inter-
subjectivity of this or that concrete cultural community. The main problem for a
phenomenological epistemology in the narrower sense is, hence, the justification
of the claim that objectively valid knowledge is possible, along with the question
of how it is possible in different regions of intentional objects and the task of
determining the limits of this knowledge in the sciences.
Solutions for the problem of offering criteria for objective validity in traditional
universal philosophical systems, e.g., the system of Hegel, have the advantage
(or disadvantage?) that they are always ultimately self-referential. Such ontic claims
are, as mentioned above, a priori in brackets for the epistemic understanding of
the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. Left for other parts of a general
phenomenological theory of science, a Wissenschaftslehre, is a phenomenological
epistemology, i.e., an epistemology that is interested in the general structures of
possible justifications of the claims of objective validity in other types of sciences.
Subjective actions and intersubjective interactions on the level of practical
life in elementary understanding and higher understanding, e.g., in the fine arts,
already follow methodical rules. The pre-scientific justification for the rules is the
experience that they usually helped to realize the goals of actions and interactions

46
Cf. e.g., LI 2010.
4.5 An Outline of the Basic Problems of a Phenomenological Epistemology. . . 89

in the past. Sophisticated activities on the level of lower understanding in the crafts,
but also on the level of higher understanding such as cult interactions, memorizing
sagas and myths, or the interpretation of texts that are significant for the tradition
are usually called disciplines. Reflections on methods presuppose methods that are
already practiced. A discipline presupposes a doctrine of methods as a more or
less systematically ordered collection of rules and general methodical principles.
A doctrine of methods presupposes reflections on methods that are already used in
the discipline.
Doctrines of methods of a discipline always have practical goals. The emergence
of a science has its generative foundation in disciplines and their practical goals.
The goal of the sciences and their methodologies, though they might admit practical
applications of their results in technologies, is first of all theoretical knowledge.
However, sciences need more than a doctrine of methods. Scientific research
requires a methodology. A methodology is a doctrine of methods together with
the epistemological justification for the claim that these methods can serve as
warrants for the intersubjective validity in principle, i.e., the objective validity of
the application of the methods.
Doctrines of methods and then methodologies are descriptions that always
implicitly refer to cogitative types, i.e., more or less closed systems of intentional
acts and active syntheses in which certain types of intentional experiences of
objects are given. The task of a phenomenological epistemology is the analysis of
methodologies as such along with cogitative types and their objective correlates.
A phenomenological analysis is, in this sense, interested in what scientists do,
and not in what they ought to do according to pre-given normative principles.
Such descriptive accounts are, however, accompanied by critical reflections on
possible justifications for the claim that the methodology does or does not warrant
intersubjective validity in principle for its results.
A methodology of a science has to determine the type of admitted theoretical
constructs guiding the search for promising hypotheses. It determines, secondly,
the basis, the type of objects that can count as objects of the science. This
determination presupposes a methodological abstraction, i.e., the determination of a
limited ontological region of objects with a common formal and material categorial
structure47 in the residuum of the abstraction, with all other types of objects always
bracketed. The universal realm in which such abstractions are possible is the
lifeworld. Closely connected with the problem of methodological abstractions is the
problem of how far and in what sense scientists are or can be so-called “disinterested
observers,” “value free” in their judgments, etc.
The “first axiom” of a phenomenological epistemology is that the basic structures
of the lifeworld in general that have been considered in chapter II are the generative
foundations of the methodological abstractions that are constitutive for sciences.
From the very beginning scientists are not isolated Cartesian subjects discovering

47
“Category” and “categorial” are here and later in this investigation used in precisely the sense
determined in the explication of the meaning of these terms in Sects. 2.2 and 2.3.
90 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

criteria of objective validity by themselves. Objective validity is first relative to

intersubjectivity for a community, and, seen from a phenomenological point of
view, the ideal of scientifically objective validity is the correlate of intersubjective
validity in principle. In science, intersubjective validity in principle is not an
absolute validity as “absolute evidence.” The conditions of intersubjective validity
in a science are determined by the methodology of the science. Intersubjective
validity in principle can only be reached by those who follow the principles of the
methodology. No relativism is implied because the methodology determines from
the outset what can count as an object of a science.
A methodology must, hence, determine the methods that can serve as warrants
for the confirmation or disconfirmation of the assumed judgments, the (hypotheses
of the science) about the objects of the basis in the residuum of the abstractive
reduction. The objects of the formal sciences are ideal objects. They are given in
eidetic intuition and formalizing abstraction. In case of the formal sciences, the
methodological abstraction that determines in its residuum the type of objects that
can be objects of the formal sciences is formalizing abstraction. The methods of
the formal sciences are formal proofs or decision procedures that serve as warrants
either for verifications of hypotheses assuming that certain well-formed formulas are
theorems of the system, or for their falsification, the denial that they are theorems
of the system.
Of interest for this investigation is, however, first of all the system of the
empirical sciences, the natural as well as the human sciences. Not very much has
been said in Husserl’s writings and the phenomenological literature after Husserl
about the specific epistemological problems of the empirical sciences. Of interest for
empirical sciences in general are objects that are accessible in intersensory observa-
tions. Seen from the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology, this means that
the observables are, as intersubjectively accessible observables given as observable
objects in the lifeworld. Even positivists and analysts admit that observations are
of interest for the empirical sciences only if they can be “intersubjectively verified,”
but positivists and analysts are usually not interested in analyzing the implications of
this methodological principle. It is essential to note that the terms “intersensory” and
“intersubjective” are meaningless in the residuum of the methodological abstraction
that is constitutive for the natural sciences because an explication of the term
“intersubjectivity” necessarily implies references to contents that can only be given
in the secondary understanding of life expressions in the lifeworld.
Two types of objects for empirical sciences given in intersensory intuition can be
distinguished:
1. It is possible to abstract from all properties of objects, for instance ideal objects
or objects mentioned in (2), that cannot be given in immediate intersensory
observations in the present.
2. It is possible to include in the residuum of the abstraction what is not immediately
present, but can be appresented in the present in life expressions of other living
bodies that are given as intersensory observables in the lifeworld. The additional
content of intersensory observations (2) is, roughly speaking, what can be given
in the secondary understanding of immediate and fixed life expressions.
4.5 An Outline of the Basic Problems of a Phenomenological Epistemology. . . 91

The methodological abstraction that is constitutive for the natural sciences

admits in its residuum only observable objects of type (1) and excludes observable
objects of type (2). This abstraction brackets, therefore, all aspects in intersensory
given observables that imply appresented contents. A detailed analysis of this
abstraction will be given in Sects. 7.1 and 7.2. The immediate objects in the
residuum (1) have to be accessible in intersensory (i.e., intersubjectively accessible)
sensory observations and only such observables can be admitted as relevant for the
methodology of the natural sciences. The methodological abstraction of the natural
sciences determines the region of observable objects that are relevant for the natural
sciences, but it does not imply that the theoretical entities of the natural sciences
have to be accessible in intersensory observations. Descriptions of the theoretical
objects of physics presuppose in addition the language of mathematics, and this
language originally refers to ideal objects, not to real objects. The epistemological
problems connected with the application of mathematics in the hard sciences will
be considered in the extensive analyses of Sects. 8.3, 8.4, and 8.5.
What theoretical entities are for the natural sciences in general is determined
in at least logically compatible statements or in axiomatic systems of statements.
Such statements, the so-called “laws of nature,” are universalized conditionals that
refer in the antecedent to causal conditions and in the consequent to effects of
causal conditions. A methodology of the natural sciences must be able to determine
criteria that are able to justify the claim of such statements to be universal and to
determine the specific character of this universality. Universalized conditionals of
this type are called hypotheses before they are tested with the aid of the criteria, i.e.,
before they are tested in experiments that are able to decide whether their claim to
be universal can be confirmed or disconfirmed. The natural law only covers cases
of what is. Laws understood in social contexts determine first of all what ought
to be. A philosophically conscious metaphorical transfer from the understanding
of the latter meaning of the term “law” to the former ought to be aware of the
monotheistic implications of such a transfer. The criteria can be found and have been
found in descriptions, and that means phenomenologically acceptable descriptions
of what natural scientists in the lifeworld do and have done by Herschel and Mill.
Analysts have added logical and methodological refinements that will be considered
in Sects. 7.2 and 8.1.
A methodology of the natural sciences has to justify why and how predictions
of events in the near future but also in longer distances in the future, are possible.
It must, furthermore, justify how and why such universalized conditionals can be
used to provide explanations in the past and to determine what has really happened
in the past in connection with further observations in a history of nature. The
problem of natural history and its relation to history as a human science will be
considered in Sect. 9.1. Natural sciences also require methodological guidelines for
the determination of the conditions that are able to justify predictions of events.
The objects of the empirical basis of humanistic disciplines are according
to (2) life expressions, and their theoretical goal is the scientific interpretation
of the meaning of the life expressions. What is meant in life expressions are
contexts of lower and higher understanding. The objects in the empirical region
92 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

of systematic human sciences, i.e., psychology and the social sciences, are life
expressions of contemporaries given in the present including fixed life expressions
and immediate life expressions. The historical human sciences are restricted to
fixed life expressions of predecessors in the past context of a more or less foreign
lifeworld. Prima facie it is more promising to ask first for the justification of the
claim of the systematic human sciences to be empirical sciences.
Like the natural sciences the systematic human sciences have an interest in
the discovery of causal relations and causal laws. This is possible because facts
given in the region of objects for the systematic human sciences are presently given
immediate and fixed life expressions. However, discoveries of causal relations in this
field presuppose interpretations, and with this presupposition the epistemological
question whether and how interpreted life expressions can be the referents of
judgments about causal relations. Seen from here, it is better to start with the
historical humanistic disciplines. The facts in the empirical basis of historical human
sciences are only fixed life expressions of authors in a more or less distant and
foreign past, and the problem of causal relations is reduced to the problem of
historical explanations. History is not and cannot be interested in the discovery of
causal laws in the present. It is interested in historical facts in the past, and it is
meaningless to test predictions of the effect of a cause in the past. What was the
effect of a cause in the past has already happened as an event in the past.
A caveat must be added. Human sciences, and especially the historical human
sciences, will be analyzed as empirical sciences, i.e., as human sciences applying
the methodology of philological-historical research that will be analyzed in Part
II. Human sciences are usually defined as recognized academic disciplines using
all kinds of methods, including interpretation schemes that imply explanatory
schemes and, hence, vaguely defined causal relations.48 It is also more or less
implicitly recognized that the final goal of the human sciences is not merely
the interpretation of the meaning of fixed life expressions but beyond this the
application49 of this meaning for and in the context of the present system of first-
order higher interpretations. Such universal schemes of interpretation imply more
or less explicitly and in different ways a certain primacy or priority of the human
sciences over the natural sciences. Of basic significance for a phenomenological
epistemology of the empirical sciences is that Husserl himself also defended such a
priority in his writings since Ideas II.
Reading Ideas II and later works of Husserl, e.g., the Crisis, the reader is left with
the impression that in the case of the natural sciences the residuum of the abstractive
reduction is a region without a soul (entseelt) and as such is opposed to the concrete

48
Such schemes guide, e.g., psychoanalytic interpretations of events and/or texts and works of art
and their authors, but also deconstructions of texts. The earmark of such interpretation schemes
is: one size, i.e., in such cases the same theoretical background, fits all; cf. below esp. Sects. 6.1
and 6.4.
49
Of central significance in this respect is Gadamer 1965 in the wake of Heidegger’s fundamental
ontological interpretation of “understanding.”
4.5 An Outline of the Basic Problems of a Phenomenological Epistemology. . . 93

lifeworld, whereas the lifeworld is the ontological region of the human sciences.
This region is the spiritual world (geistige Welt), and the spiritual world has priority
over the material world. This is, of course, more than one step in the direction of
an ontic idealistic interpretation of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction
and is not compatible with an epistemic interpretation. Thus according to the ontic
interpretation of the residuum of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction,
the region of the human sciences is the lifewold as the spiritual world, and Husserl
was, therefore, able to say that transcendental phenomenology is coextensive with
Dilthey’s spiritual world (geistige Welt).50 The problem with this account of the
region of the human sciences is whether the human sciences can still be recognized
as empirical sciences at all, because in this case it is not possible to determine the
realm of observable objects that are objects for a methodology in the residuum of a
methodological abstraction. In other words, it is difficult to distinguish between
the human sciences as empirical sciences and phenomenological descriptive
analyses.
The foundation of the empirical basis of the methodological abstraction of the
natural sciences is the encounter with the natural environment in the lifeworld.
This methodological abstraction brackets all practical interests, purposes, and
values of elementary understanding and all other systems of higher understanding.
Since the attitude of the natural sciences as a genre of higher understanding
is determined by this methodological abstraction, a natural scientist is in this
sense a “disinterested observer and researcher” of nature after the reduction. The
interest left is a theoretical interest. Other interests and their objects have a place
in the residuum of the abstraction of the natural sciences only if they can be
“explained” as “epiphenomena.” An answer to the question of what “explanation
of epiphenomena” might mean can only be given after the epistemological analyses
in the following chapters of this investigation.
A consequence of this understanding of the abstractive reduction that is constitu-
tive for the natural science and assumes the ontological priority of the lifeworld or
the world of the spirit (geistige Welt) as the domain of the human sciences51 is that
it is questionable how “disinterested” observations and empirical research will be
possible for the human sciences. Arguments by analogy can be misleading, but they

50
See Hua IV, esp. §§49, 53, and 64, cf. Seebohm 2013.
51
The Crisis and On the Origin of Geometry is in the center of the interpretations of Husserl’s turn
to history in Hopkins 2011, 174ff and Moran 2013 chapter 5, but history is already of significance
in Ideas II in reflections on Dilthey, Rickert and others interested in the epistemology of the human
sciences, cf. Seebohm 2013. Of interest is in this respect that the appendices XII and XIII of
Hua IV reveal an ambiguity in Husserl’s account of the historical human sciences. What is said
about history and the historical or spiritual world as a world given in the natural attitude in XII is
precisely that what is said about the lifeworld as the world given in the natural attitude in XIII. The
Crisis and related manuscripts in Hua XXXIX neglect the epistemological problems of a scientific
“history of facts.” What is of significance are reflections on the “meaning of history” as universal
history, its teleology etc., in short what has been called “philosophy of history” since Hegel, i.e.,
metaphysical considerations beyond attempts to develop an epistemology of history as a science,
cf. Moran 2013, 143–147.
94 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

can be useful guidelines in the search for promising assumptions. The originally
guiding interest of interpretations is the need to restore communications and
interactions and, therefore, always connected with applications and rejections.
The assumption by analogy is that the interest in involvements in interactions,
in applications and rejection must be bracketed if the studies in the humanistic
disciplines can become human sciences and the attitude of the human scientist can
be understood as the attitude of a “disinterested observer.”
There is, of course, the epistemological question of the presuppositions of the
possibility of the attitude of a “disinterested observer.” It is, therefore, worthwhile
to presuppose at this point not the ontic but the epistemic interpretation of the
transcendental phenomenological reduction in order to indicate a possible partial
explication of the meaning of “disinterested observer” with the model of method-
ological abstractions as necessary implications of the methodologies of sciences.
The human sciences are, according to Dilthey but also others, e.g., Alfred Schutz,
understanding sciences. Presupposing what has been mentioned above about the
typology of understanding, it can be said that within the lifeworld, the human
sciences are only interested in and reduced to the region of secondary understanding
of first-order elementary and higher understanding of Others, i.e., the understanding
of the meaning of immediate and fixed life expression of contemporaries and
predecessors as observable objects. All other aspects of the lifeworld given in
first-order elementary and higher understanding of the interpreter are excluded.
This abstractive reduction that determines the region of the human sciences in
general can also be understood as a partial explication of the meaning of “being
a disinterested observer” in the human sciences. It can also be considered as an
analogue of the methodological abstraction that determines the region of the natural
sciences in general as the region that is originally given as the natural environment,
an independent part of the structure of the lifeworld.
What follows are some hints that require further analyses, but are sufficient
for a preliminary outline of the tasks of a phenomenological epistemology and a
preliminary answer to the question why this investigation begins with history as
a science, then turns to the natural sciences, and considers the systematic human
sciences, i.e., psychology and the social sciences, at the end in Part IV.
The goal of the philological-historical method (and of archaeological methods)
is the interpretation of fixed life expressions of author(s) in the past. There is, hence,
within the residuum of the first abstraction the specific methodological abstraction
of the historical human sciences. This reduction is implied in methodologically
guided secondary interpretations of what life expressions meant in their own tem-
poral context in the past, and not in the present temporal context of the interpreter.52
What is excluded or bracketed in such interpretations are all applications and
rejections, all evaluations of the contents of the interpreted fixed life expressions
from the viewpoint of the first-order elementary and higher understanding in the
present temporal context of the interpreter. The structural foundation that admits

52
A detailed explication will be given in Sects. 5.3 and 5.4.
4.5 An Outline of the Basic Problems of a Phenomenological Epistemology. . . 95

such a separation of interpretation and application is the temporal distance between

the lived intersubjective time of the author(s) of the fixed life expression in the past
and of the interpreter in the present.
History as a science is a special case. History and histories are usually understood
as narrations about sequences of events that have happened in the past. A separation
of interpretation and application in such narratives as products of creative writing
is possible, but it presupposes in these cases the results of history as a science.
Historical narrations that can count as reports of the results of history as a
science emerged only together with and after the emergence of methodologically
guided historical research. Scientific historical research presupposes interpretations
of historical sources including pre-scientific historical narrations, that apply the
methodology of the philological-historical method. A detailed analysis will be given
in Sect. 5.5. Beyond that, however, historical research is first of all interested in the
reconstruction of what really happened in the past. What history adds to philological
research is the reconstructive determination and explanation of past sequences of
events in the general framework of intersubjective time.
In its interpretations of the meaning of the actions, interactions, and events in
the past for the past history is still bound to the methodological abstraction of the
philological-historical method, but history transcends the limits of this abstractive
reduction because its reconstructions presuppose the spatial and temporal structures
of the lifeworld in general. History accordingly includes dimensions of the lifeworld
that also belong to the natural environment and this means the basis of the
methodological foundations that are constitutive for the natural sciences. In this
respect history has the potential of serving as a mediator in the alleged strict
opposition between the natural sciences as sciences of explanation and the human
sciences as sciences of understanding. In this respect the relation between history
and the social human sciences is of crucial epistemological significance.
The period in which history as a science is able to apply the methodology of
the interpretation of fixed life expressions of predecessors is limited. The history
of cultures without a literary tradition, i.e., so-called pre-history, is still accessible
for archaeological research, but even archaeological research is in this period
increasingly replaced by research in paleontology. Paleontology is, however, already
a discipline of natural history, and research in paleontology must exclusively apply
explanations taken from the natural sciences, explanations that have been used
in history as a human science in its reconstructions only as additional sources
for the reconstruction of temporal sequences of events and in explanations. A
final evaluation of the significance of pre-history, archeological research, and
paleontology for the status of the historical human sciences in the system of the
sciences will be given in Sect. 9.1.
The second historical phase in which the methodology of fixed life expressions
of predecessors in the past is no longer applicable is contemporary history. The
temporal distance that provided the foundation of the possible separation of
interpretation and application of fixed life expressions of predecessors decreases and
finally vanishes in a past that is only given as the past horizon of the actual present of
interpretation. It is, hence, difficult to find a convincing epistemological justification
96 4 The Lifeworld and the System of the Sciences: First Steps Toward. . .

for a possible separation of interpretation and application and for the claim that
research in contemporary history can offer “objectively valid” interpretations of
“disinterested” interpreters. The systematic human sciences are first of all interested
in social events in the actual present and their immediate past and future horizon.
Thus they share the basic methodological difficulty of contemporary history. A
possible of coping with this difficulty is the diagnostic dialogue, a method that will
be considered in Sect. 10.3.
The systematic human sciences are interested not only in explanations of events
in the past horizon of the present, but also, like the natural sciences, in predictions
of future events. Research carried out with the aim of proposing well-grounded
hypothetical predictions presuppose research interested in events in the past horizon
of the present, the realm of contemporary history, and beyond that the results of
historical research about relevant developments in a more distant past.53
It will be shown in Part IV not only that the social sciences are a necessary
extension of history, but also that they presuppose and imply history as a science
as their foundation. Both together are sciences that presuppose interpretations, but
they also imply the first-order elementary and higher understanding of the natural
environment of the lifeworld of the interpreter. This first-order understanding has
to be bracketed in the interpretations of philology and archaeology, but it will turn
out that even the philological-historical method has its historical aspect, and history
as the science of the reconstruction of what was really the case is more than an
understanding science or, in the terminology that has been introduced above, a
science of interpretation, i.e., methodologically guided second-order understanding.
Setting aside what will be called genuine historical explanations, history can borrow
explanatory results from the natural sciences for its reconstructions of past real
temporal sequences and explanations. In addition the social sciences can borrow
results of the natural sciences for the determination of initial conditions that
are relevant for predictions in the social sciences. History as a science and the
social sciences are sciences in a lifeworld with natural sciences, and the natural
environment is given for them in this context not only as the natural environment
of the lifeworld, but also as the region of the higher understanding of the natural
sciences.
A caveat has to be added. The critique of Dilthey’s and Rickert’s epistemological
reflections on the system of the sciences will have consequences for the critical
re-evaluation of Husserl’s phenomenological reflections on the difference between
the natural and the human sciences and the relations between psychology or
history and transcendental phenomenology in the following investigations. Of
significance are first of all the epistemological problems of the interdependencies
between the human sciences and the natural sciences; the partial foundation of
the social human sciences in history as a science; and history as a science with a

53
First of all, the history of technology, of economics, of the law, and of political history all
provide necessary material for the development of the “constructs” that are of interest not only
for explanations, but also for predictions in the social sciences. Cf. Sects. 9.2 and 10.4.
4.5 An Outline of the Basic Problems of a Phenomenological Epistemology. . . 97

methodology that presupposes the methodology of the sciences of interpretations

of fixed life expressions, especially philology (and the interdependencies between
these problems are significant as well).
What can be found in this respect in Husserl’s later writings on history and
the relation between history and phenomenology54 will be at least partially incom-
patible, i.e., materially eidetically and not merely formally inconsistent, with the
results of the following epistemological investigations. It will, however, be possible
to show that the solutions for the three problems that are offered in the following
investigations are compatible with the interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenological
analyses of the structures of the lifeworld in general that has been offered in Chap. 2.
What has to be added are only the compatible extensions to Husserl’s analyses, first
of all in Sect. 3.2, the typology of understanding and in Sect. 3.5 on causality.

54
An interpretation of all essential aspects of Husserl’ s phenomenological account of history can
be found in Ströker 1987, esp. ch. IX, but also in chs. X and XI. The interpretation includes
numerous references to the German literature about Husserl and history.
 Part II
The Methodology of the Historical
Human Sciences
Chapter 5
History as a Science of Interpretation

5.1 Doctrines of Methods of Humanistic Disciplines

and the Problem of the Developments of Methodologies
for the Human Sciences

The materials of the historical humanistic disciplines are fixed life expressions
authored in the past, and especially in a distant past that is more or less foreign
to the present. The methods of the historical human sciences presuppose each
other in various ways. History is the reconstruction of a past real lifeworld and its
historical development. The presently pre-given facts for historical reconstructions
are first of all the already philologically interpreted texts. This does not imply
that historians have to wait until philologists have interpreted the texts. Usually
historians are themselves well trained in interpreting texts reporting events and
actions that have been of significance for historically relevant developments, e.g.,
annals, contemporary historiographies, and legal sources, including treaties and
reports about diplomatic activities.
Philologists are first of all interested in literature belonging to other branches
of higher understanding in a past lifeworld: poetic, religious, and philosophical
texts. They are less interested in the interpretation of law texts and texts of
the natural sciences. However, philological research also presupposes historical
research. Questions belonging to the interpretation of a text often immediately
imply questions about the author and her/his biography. A biography is, however,
a historical reconstruction of a past reality and has to use the methods of historical
research. Finally, philological research is incomplete without research in the field
of the history of poetry, of religions, of philosophy, and last but not least, of the
sciences, and this research too once again implies historical investigations. The
method of philological research has, therefore, often been called the philological-
historical method.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 101

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_5
102 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

Modern historical research presupposes in addition archaeological interpretations

of presently given artifacts and monuments created in a past lifeworld.
Archaeological interpretations can use interpretations of texts with information
about the use and the purpose, i.e., the meaning, of artifacts and monuments
whenever this is possible. This possibility is, however, restricted to historical
archaeology. The situation is different in pre-historic archaeology, i.e., in the case
of past lifeworlds without literary traditions.
The development of methodologies for the historical human sciences has its
generative foundations in the development of philology, archaeology, and history
as disciplines that had not yet been recognized as sciences before the nineteenth
century after the emergence of the natural sciences in the sixteenth century. It will
be useful to have a look into the development of the doctrines of methods of the
historical human disciplines before the emergence of the ideal of hermeneutics as
a methodology first for philology and then for classical archaeology and history.
A possible methodology beyond a doctrine of methods for history as a science
presupposes first of all a methodology for the interpretation of historical sources
and the determination of the scope and the significance of this methodology for
historical research. It is, hence, necessary to start with philology.
The methods of philological research are of basic interest for the doctrine of
methods of the historical human disciplines. Philologists reflecting on their methods
already discovered in the age of Hellenism general methodical viewpoints for
correct interpretations. A first group of such rules has been derived from the theory
of the levels of hermeneutics.1 The presupposition for correct interpretation is the
correctness of the grammatical interpretation of texts, including as higher levels
etymology, the explanation of historical facts and technical terms, and finally, the
interpretation of rhetorical and poetic figures. The highest level of hermeneutics
was the level of aesthetic and literary criticism.
The theory of the levels of hermeneutics implies analogues of falsifications
and verifications of proposed interpretations. Interpretations of style and genre
are falsified if they presuppose errors in the grammatical interpretation of the
text. Interpretations of the genre can be falsified if they presuppose errors in
the interpretation of the style of the text. Falsifications of assumptions on the
grammatical level can falsify in addition assumptions concerning interpretations of
style and assumptions on the level of generic interpretations.
A caveat must be added. This use of “true” and “false” means “satisfies a pre-
given norm” or “does not satisfy the norm” for philology as a discipline. The
philologists of Classical Antiquity and later the humanists of the Renaissance
understood the rules of grammar and all other rules derived from higher levels of
interpretation not only as rules for correct interpretations, but also as normative rules

1
Hermeneutics or the art of grammar was the name for a doctrine of methods in Classical Antiquity,
in the middle Ages, and in the tradition of the humanists. But the name was also had been used
later for the methodology of philological-historical research in the nineteenth century. cf. Seebohm
2004, §2.
5.1 Doctrines of Methods of Humanistic Disciplines and the Problem. . . 103

for the correct use of language in oral and written discourse. The knowledge of
the language and its grammar was considered as an independent presupposition for
possible interpretations of texts. The theory of literary genres was also understood
as a normative guideline for writing and for literary criticism.
A second general viewpoint for a system of methodical guidelines for hermeneu-
tics was the canon of the whole and the parts. Sextus Empiricus already discovered
the circle of the whole and the parts as a basic paradox that can be used for the
skeptical destruction of the ideal of truth of the scholars, i.e., the philologists.2
A basic methodical rule of protestant biblical hermeneutics in the age of the
Reformation recommended that the main task of understanding is to understand
the scopus of the text. The scopus is the leading intention of a text revealing the
whole of its meaning. The understanding of the leading intention of the whole of
the text is the presupposition for interpretations of the meaning of the parts of the
text. Several formulations for this principle which was later called the second canon
of hermeneutics, can be found in the philological research of the humanists before
the nineteenth century.3
A methodology reflects and modifies the general methodical viewpoints and
canons of a pre-given doctrine of methods. A modified theory of the levels of
hermeneutics was necessary for the development of hermeneutics as the method-
ology of philological research. Boeckh distinguished lower and higher levels of
interpretation and criticism. The lower level is the level of the objective conditions of
texts, grammar, and the historical context; the higher level is the level of subjective
conditions, and includes individual and generic interpretation and critique. Boeckh
also distinguished different types of wholes, including the whole of the language,
the whole of the historical context, the whole of the works of an author, and the
whole of the text in generic interpretation and critique without referring explicitly
to older formulations of the second canon.
It was Schleiermacher who proposed the general formula for the methodical rules
that can be derived from the first canon of hermeneutics, i.e., the canon of the whole
and the parts. He also proposed in his second canon a methodological principle that
that can be used as a warrant of objective validity in interpretation4:
The meaning of each word in a given place must be determined according to its being
together with the surrounding words.

Schleiermacher’s second canon is a canon for grammatical interpretation and

critique, the parts are the words and the next surrounding wholes are the sentences.
Dilthey generalized Schleiermacher’s canon. He understood the canon as a meta-
canon for methodical rules of the human sciences in general, and discovered that it is

2
Sextus Empiricus 1949, in the title Against the Professors, the “professors” are the philologists.
3
For the scopus principle see Seebohm 2004, 27, 44. For formulations of the second canon cf. Betti
1967, §16, 219–225.
4
Schleiermacher 1959, 116f.
104 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

this canon that implies the famous circle of the whole as the circle of hermeneutics.5
After Dilthey this circle of hermeneutics had a remarkable career, beginning with
Heidegger’s “circle of understanding” as a principle underlying all understanding.6
It is, however, obvious according to Being and Time that the circle of understanding
ought not to be understood as a methodological scientific principle in any sense.
That the “circle of the whole and the parts” has a general ontological significance
was known before Heidegger. Plato, for instance, already knew the problem of the
whole and the parts as a problem in ontological reflections on being qua being. This
career of the canon of the whole and the parts will be of significance in the following
sections.
It is of significance for the understanding of these following sections to keep
in mind what has already been mentioned: the doctrine of methods of philology
as a discipline before the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher, Boeckh, and others.
The question of the final task of the theory of the levels of hermeneutics and the
canon of the whole and the parts are not merely rules for the interpretation of
texts. These rules have also been understood as rules for the standards of correct
or incorrect writing of texts. This understanding of the rules implies that the claims
for truth in texts in the broadest sense ought to be applied by the interpreter. It
can be admitted that the doctrine of methods, e.g., of the humanists before the
nineteenth century, is able to prove that violations of the rules of grammar can lead
to misunderstandings and “falsify” interpretations of the meaning of the text on
higher levels if the interpreter and not the author of the text itself is responsible for
the grammatical mistake. But if such violations occur in the sentences of the text, it
is also always possible to assume that the author violated the rules of grammar and
has to be blamed for that.
Misunderstandings in interpretations of the genre and with it the scopus, the
leading intention of the texts, are possible on the level of generic interpretations.
But when violations of the rules determining a literary genre occur in the text itself
and these violations are discovered in an interpretation of the text, they do not
falsify the interpretation. Seen from the viewpoint of the normative understanding
of philological hermeneutics, they indicate that a text violates a norm and ought to
be blamed for this violation on the level of literary criticism, the highest level in the
theories of the levels of hermeneutics developed in late Classical Antiquity.
The final task of the humanistic studies of the literary tradition was to discover the
ideal of true humanity. The unity of interpretation and application of the tradition of
the old philologists and humanists is not broken. Their main purpose was, therefore,
educational. Interpretation and application are not separated. But application always
implies possible rejections. The methods of philology as a discipline had to serve a
higher normative purpose. Its task was to decide the truth or falsity, the application
or rejection of the truth claims not only of the interpretation of a text, but of
the text itself. Interpretation and application/rejection are inseparable correlates.

5
Dilthey GS 7, 217f; 243f; SW 3, 237f; 262f.
6
Heidegger 1977, §32.
5.1 Doctrines of Methods of Humanistic Disciplines and the Problem. . . 105

There is no room for a distance between the interpreter and the text, the researcher
and his object. This distance is, however, the “presupposition of the possibility”
for a methodology that can count as a warrant of intersubjectively recognized
objective validity. A pre-scientific understanding of rules for interpretations of texts
always implies normative aspects. But it is precisely the normative aspect that
has to be bracketed in a methodologically guided interpretation of texts. It is not
compatible with the systems of the hermeneuticists of the nineteenth century and
with Schleiermacher’s first canon of hermeneutics.
Archaeology has a short history. It emerges as a discipline in the Renaissance
immediately together with the re-birth of interest in the literature of Classical
Antiquity and the old ideal of philology in the humanistic interpretation of these
sources. Normative viewpoints dominated the understanding of the re-discovered
and partially “unearthed” monuments of Classical Antiquity. The arts and the
architecture of the Greeks and the Romans were understood as archetypes of beauty
and true humanity. Approximately until the middle of the nineteenth century the
normative attitude, and with it the immediate unity of interpretation and application
were an essential aspect of archaeological research. Archaeology became a part
of “the sciences of Classical Antiquity” after the attempts of Boeckh and others
to develop the methodology of philology in the nineteenth century. The next step
toward a general historical archaeology was the growing interest in monuments of
the culture of the Middle Ages, and then also those of East Asian and other cultures.
The final step in the nineteenth century was then the discovery of so-called pre-
historical cultures, the emergence of pre-historical archaeological research.
The development of a doctrine of archaeological methods in the nineteenth
century was from the very beginning accompanied by methodological reflections.
Some loose remarks about the methods of archaeology are possible and necessary
to prepare the discussion of the central methodological problems in Sect. 5.4. These
preliminary considerations already indicate that a methodology of archaeology
cannot be reduced to the methodological problems of the historical human sciences
as “sciences of understanding.” The methods include aspects belonging to the
methodology of the systematic human sciences, and even of the natural sciences
and natural history.
Prima facie the essential methods of archaeology seem to be the methods of
“digging out” and in general of the discovery of its objects, and the methods of
determining the material and the age of the objects. Such methods use technologies
that have been developed by the natural sciences. But such methods have also
been used in other branches of the historical human sciences and the life sciences.
Paleography, the search for and the dating of old manuscripts as a discipline of
philology, and even paleontology as a life science have used and still use similar
methods.
Essential for archaeology and paleography as branches of the historical human
sciences is that the objects discovered are fixed human life expressions belonging to
a past foreign human lifeworld, and not presently given traces of organisms of past
periods of natural history. The goal of the search for the objects of archaeology is the
106 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

discovery of precisely such fixed life expressions. The essential task of archaeology
as a branch of the historical human sciences is the interpretation, the understanding
of the meaning of such objects.
The distinction between historical archaeology and pre-historical archaeology
is of basic significance for a survey of the possible methods of archaeological
interpretation. The methods that can be applied in the interpretation of artifacts
belonging to elementary understanding and of monuments belonging to higher
understanding without a literary tradition and the methods used for past lifeworlds
with a literary tradition are different. Interpretations of pre-historical artifacts and
monuments are interpretations of fixed life expressions of cultures without a literary
tradition. Historical archaeology is restricted to cultures with a literary tradition.
The meaning of artifacts belonging to elementary understanding, including
monuments as products created with the aid of tools and pre-given materials, can
be understood without additional written information in cultures without and with
a literary tradition.7 What is required is first of all the understanding of possible
applications of the tools to raw materials. This implies knowledge of the natural
environment of the past cultural lifeworld. It implies, furthermore, the presently
available immediate understanding of possible actions of the human body, and
finally presently known conditions of successful communications via immediate
life expressions in general. Such information can be gained in quasi-experimental
actions of the interpreter in the present and can be backed by information borrowed
from the natural sciences. Additional information can also be gained with the aid of
comparative methods. Ethnology as a systematic human science is able to provide
rich materials for comparisons with presently accessible cultures without a literary
tradition. Such interpretations of artifacts of pre-historical cultures always have the
character of complex reconstructions. They are reliable insofar as they presuppose
aspects that belong to the structures of elementary understanding in the lifeworld in
general.
Archaeological interpretations of monuments of pre-historical cultures in terms
of the culture itself are impossible. Reports written by past contemporary authors
belonging to a foreign culture with a literary tradition, e.g., the reports of the
Spaniards about the highly developed Indian cultures in Middle and South America,
are dubious methodical crutches. Left are only comparative methods assuming
parallels between presently known non-literary cultures provided by ethnology.
Interpretations of monuments in past foreign literary cultures in terms of the
culture itself are possible to the degree to which written materials about the meaning
of the monuments for the contemporary systems of higher understanding of the
past foreign lifeworld are available. An interpretation of, e.g., what a statue of
a god in Classical Antiquity, an icon in a Greek or Russian Orthodox medieval

7
There are aspects of cultures in past historical periods that have been neglected in the literature
of these periods, because they belong to the realm of the elementary and higher understanding of
illiterate working classes or because they belong to the secret traditions of sophisticated arts in the
guilds of craftsmen.
5.1 Doctrines of Methods of Humanistic Disciplines and the Problem. . . 107

church, or sculptures and paintings in Roman Catholic medieval churches meant

for the contemporaries presupposes the interpretation of contemporary literature.
Their main significance was certainly not that they are works of fine art of a high
aesthetic quality. The upshot is that interpretations of monuments in cultures with
a written tradition presuppose philological interpretations of contemporary texts
with reports about the meaning and significance of the monuments. In such cultural
contexts, archaeological interpretations and their historical dimension are, therefore,
an essential part not only of the history of the arts and architecture, but also of the
history of ideas of past cultural lifeworlds.
Reflections on methods of history as a discipline have to distinguish between
methods of historiography and methods of historical research. Essential for such
reflections is the distinction between the simple historical search for historical
sources and higher-level historical research, including historical critique. Only
historical critique is able to develop methodological criteria for intersubjectively
convincing decisions of open historical questions.
In the beginning history was a special type of literary genre for narrations
about what has happened, and such narrations of significant events and actions that
happened in the past, i.e., history, are understood as historiography. Taking further
steps of the development of history into account, two types of historiography can
be distinguished. On the first level we have narrations about what happened in the
immediate past of the present. In other words, they report what happened in their
now past contemporary history: annals, histories about past significant chains of
events, e.g., the Peloponnesian war of Thucydides, autobiographies, and memories.
Higher-level historiographies are narrations of historical developments of deeds and
events in larger periods in a more or less distant past. They have to use the reports
of the first level and other sources, such as treaties, files of legal decisions, and other
material.
The writing of historiographies on the first level already presupposes the gather-
ing, and in some cases also the possible critical evaluation, of information. It implies
historical research, reconstructions of a past reality. Such methods of investigation
presuppose in the beginning nothing more than the methods of questioning what
happened and why and how it happened in the past horizon of everyday experience
in the lifeworld. What really happened, what was the case, is a historical fact. Asking
for facts of the immediate past in everyday experience implies asking for causal
explanations. How causes and explanations are originally understood in lifeworlds
without science has been mentioned in Sect. 3.3 above.
Only lifeworlds with sciences can also use scientific causal explanations and their
understanding of causes. Well-known sophisticated models for such investigations
of what really happened and why it has happened are the investigations of
responsible journalists or criminal investigations in the court of law. Such disputes
can trust or doubt the reports of the memory of witnesses, i.e., oral discourse, other
immediate life expressions, and written documents. They can rely, furthermore, on
“silent witnesses” of traces of the past that can be found in the natural environment.
Finally, they can rely on or doubt the reports of oral or written traditions for more
distant phases of the past horizon of the present.
108 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

The available materials for the type of research that is presupposed in histori-
ographies of the second level are historiographies belonging to the first level, and
in addition other written documents. The research can be accompanied by critical
assumptions. Such critical assumptions are restricted to the question whether the
sources are trustworthy or whether they lie or partially hide or bend the truth, or
whether documents (and especially legal documents) are falsifications.
The selection of the sources and the critical evaluation of the material in
historiographies are not only guided by an interest in finding out the truth about what
happened. In the last instance, the guiding intentions behind such historiographies
reporting the outcome of historical research always imply norm-guided evaluations.
Historiographies are, like some other literary genres, prima facie valuable for the
present because they can be used for entertainment. Their main purpose is, however,
to convince the reader that their interpretation of what happened ought to be applied
in the present, but this means vice versa that their way of understanding and
evaluating the past is determined by the present situation of the historiographer in
her/his present cultural lifeworld.
The early Roman histories are collections of reports about deeds of famous
Romans that can serve as normative examples of Roman virtues. Histories of the life
and the deeds of saints as well as biographies of famous persons demand admiration
and imitation. The goal of histories about the life of prophets serves in addition the
task of propagating their teachings and demanding that everybody ought to follow
these teachings. The final goal of histories of towns like Rome, and of later empires
and nations is to praise their significance and fame and to demand the promotion
of the common weal of one’s own community in the present. Universal histories
and world histories understand historical development as the history of religious
salvation or as the secular salvation of humankind through the progress of human
reason.
Without entering into the discussion of epistemological problems, some remarks
are possible about changes in the web of relations between historical research and
the genres of historiography as consequences of methodologically guided historical
research. Research in history as a discipline presupposes methods. Research in
history as a science requires a methodology that can serve as a warrant of
intersubjectively recognized objectivity for the evaluation of the confirmation or
disconfirmation for proposed interpretations and reconstructions. Without this a
simple search for sources, even if it is accompanied by critical remarks about the
sources, can be called research only in a restricted sense. But methodologically
guided critique is not only critique of the sources; also it implies a critical check
of past historical research, and this means critique both of historiographies of the
second level and of historiographies based on historical research that is already
methodologically guided.
The new situation causes changes in the system of historiographies. We have,
on the one hand, a new genre of writing history now including articles in journals
and books about special research problems. Reports about events in the past are
now connected with reports about the research procedures applied;, with rejected
assumptions in other available historiographies, information about justified results
5.1 Doctrines of Methods of Humanistic Disciplines and the Problem. . . 109

in the literature; and last but not least, with attempts to determine whether or
not open questions can be decided with available primary sources and other
information.8 Apart from biographies and comprehensive historical narrations about
historical development in certain periods for laymen or as a source of quick
information, all other genres are obliged to indicate their relation to the state of
the art in footnotes, quotations, and general references to other literature.
The reconstructions of history can rely on the preparatory work of philological
and archaeological research and interpretation of fixed life expressions in general
including texts. Historical archaeology can use in addition to its own methods,
philological interpretations of texts for the interpretation of archaeological material.
This cooperation is indispensable for interpretations of monuments that belong to
the level of higher understanding in past cultural lifeworlds. The distinction between
history and prehistory is strict seen from a methodological point of view. But
this does not exclude that there is, regarding the material, a grey zone between
both. First, there exist, as already mentioned, written contemporary sources about
cultural monuments within cultures without a written tradition of their own, written
by more or less sympathetic contemporary observers belonging to cultures with a
written tradition. Secondly, there are some so called eminent texts, e.g., the Iliad,
the New and the Old Testament, and the Koran, that can provide guidelines for the
understanding of cultural monuments and are available for philological research.
Pre-historical archaeology can be helpful for the decisions of some open questions
in such cases.9 Finally, written sources belonging to the first level of historiography
of earlier periods report almost nothing about the historical development of the
lower classes in a past cultural lifeworld. This implies that they are also silent about
sometimes very significant technological and even economic events, e.g., successful
new inventions, on the level of elementary understanding.10 Historical research is in
this case restricted to archaeological sources.
These reflections on the material, the presently given facts for the human sci-
ences, and the methods of history as a discipline indicate two necessary distinctions
for history, but also for archaeology and philology. There is first the distinction
between pre-history and history. Seen from the viewpoint of available material
and applicable methods “pre-history” can be defined as the history of non-literary
cultural lifeworlds. The available material for historical reconstructions is restricted
to artifacts and monuments as fixed life expressions. No material for philological
interpretations is available. Only the material for archaeological research and the
methods of archaeological interpretation are left.
The second distinction is the distinction between interpretation and application,
and especially the issue of the possible application of historical reconstructions

8
The old technical term for the negative answer is “non liquet,” i.e., “there is not enough
information.”
9
However, there are sometimes also controversies between philologists and archaeologists, e.g., in
the last decade the controversies about the origin of the Iliad and the location of Troy.
10
For instance, the invention of windmills in the Middle Ages.
110 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

and applications. The unity of interpretation and application in historiographies

and their underlying historical research was not dissolved on the second level of
the development of historical literature. What has been said up until now about
methodologically guided historical research and historiographies already implies
some consequences for this unity. It can be assumed that this unity has to be
completely dissolved for methodologically guided historical research, and is also
only of restricted significance in historiographies on this level in a lifeworld with
sciences.11

5.2 The Canons of Hermeneutics: A Critical Re-Examination

The first steps towards a precise epistemological analysis of a methodology for

empirical research in the natural sciences were carried out by John Stuart Mill
and his immediate forerunners, first of all John F. W. Herschel, at the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.12 A methodology of philol-
ogy, i.e., a methodological hermeneutics, exists in the first half of the nineteenth
century since Schleiermacher and Boeckh.13 A first comprehensive methodology
of history can be found in Droysen’s lectures and a short published outline of the
lectures, the Historik, in the second half of the nineteenth century.14 Archaeology is
a special case. The distinction between artifacts requiring elementary understanding
and monuments belonging to the realm of higher understanding, and the parallel
distinction between historical and pre-historical archaeology mentioned in the last
section, are essential for a methodology of archaeological interpretation. Books on
the methods of archaeological hermeneutics in the nineteenth century are almost
exclusively interested in methodical problems of historical archaeology.15
Philology is the oldest discipline of the historical human studies and it is also
the first discipline of the human studies to have established itself as a human
science. A methodology of the historical human sciences must, therefore, begin
with reflections on the methodology of philology. Historical research presupposes

11
See Sect. 7.2 below.
12
The immediate forerunners are Hume, Kant, and Herschel. What was said about methods before,
e.g., by Bacon or Locke, is ingenious but partially misleading.
13
Boeckh 1966. Boeckh called his lectures (published only later 1886) Encyclopedia and
Methodology of the Philological Sciences (Enczclopaedie und Methodenlehre der philologischen
Wissenschaften).
14
Droysen 1977; cf. Seebohm 2004, §10.
15
According to Blass 1892, papyrology, palaeography, and archaeology are only auxiliary disci-
plines of philology; Dilthey corrected this classification. (cf. Seebohm 2004, §9, 66). According
to what has been said before about the methods and methodologies it is tempting to assume that
historical archaeology and philology are correlated disciplines that presuppose each other. Pre-
historical archaeology shows, however, that archaeology has in addition its own methodological
principles beyond this correlation.
5.2 The Canons of Hermeneutics: A Critical Re-Examination 111

methodologically guided philological and archaeological research. The genuine

methodological problems of history are the problem of the reconstruction and
interpretation of a past real lifeworld; the problem of its historical development;
and the problem of historical explanations.
A caveat has to be added. Closer consideration will show that the methods
of historical research are also presupposed vice versa in philological interpreta-
tion. Problems and disputes connected with the interdependencies of history and
philology already surfaced in the literature on hermeneutics in the nineteenth
and then again in the twentieth century. It is, therefore, useful to begin with a
preliminary distinction between philological research in the narrower sense and
philological research in the broader sense. Philological-historical research can be
called philological in the broader sense if it includes the so-called efficient history
of a text. Philological interpretations in the narrower sense are restricted to the
interpretations of texts and their past horizon to the extent to which this horizon
is given in traces that can be found in the text.
The first task of a methodology is a critical re-examination of the general
principles guiding a pre-given doctrine of methods and the identification of the
principles that can serve as criteria of objective validity. Seen from the phenomeno-
logical point of view, a methodological principle of a science is a rule for a cognitive
attitude. A cognitive attitude is a system of intentional acts of consciousness (in
short mental acts) and the act has as an intentional act always an object. The subject
of the act, the act, and object of the act are abstract moments in this universal
structure. A methodical rule is, therefore, always directed to the subject and the
object of the mental act. If a discipline claims to be a science, it needs in addition
first methodological principles that can serve as warrants of objective validity for
the confirmation or disconfirmation of hypothetical assumptions.
The first principles for the methods of philological interpretation have been
called canons of hermeneutics. Emilio Betti16 has given a systematic survey of
such canons together with references to their sources in the older tradition of
hermeneutic literature. Betti’s classification distinguished between (1) canons that
emphasized the independence of the object of interpretation and (2) canons for the
attitude of the subject of the interpretation.17 His classification is guided by his
idealistic philosophical background and by a certain preference for interpretations
in disciplines like jurisprudence and rhetoric, i.e., disciplines that are interested not
only in the interpretation, but also in the application of texts. This approach ends
in the discovery of the dialectical character of the process of interpretation. For a
more pedestrian approach, however, this “dialectical character” is only an indicator
of certain incompatibilities in Betti’s system of canons.
There are pre-figurations of Schleiermacher’s first canon of hermeneutics in the
hermeneutical tradition of philology as a discipline, but his version of the first canon

16
Betti 1967, §16, 216f.
17
The objective/subjective distinction of Betti distinguishes between text and interpreter and not,
like Boeckh’s between the objective and subjective conditions of a text.
112 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

is the earliest version that can count as a guideline for an objectively valid decision
between confirmed and falsified judgments in interpretations: whatever is in need of
further determination in a given speech ought to be determined within the limits of
the linguistic context of the author and her/his contemporary audience.18
This version is too narrow. It covers only grammatical interpretations. But
Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics has passages that indicate that the first canon can
be also applied to higher levels of hermeneutics. The rule that “a part of the text
has to be understood within the limits, i.e., the context of the whole of the text
and vice versa” can be understood as a general version of the first canon that
covers all aspects of philological interpretation. Another version mentioned by
Schleiermacher adds the dimension of understanding the author: the understanding
of the whole of the text presupposes in addition the understanding of the original
intention (Keimentschluss) of the author.19
Schleiermacher’s thesis that the understanding of the original intention of the
author is the key for the understanding of the whole of the text triggered the dispute
between the defenders of the philological historical method and the defenders of
philology in the narrower sense. More about that will be said below. It is, however,
also possible to refer to the intention of a text without mentioning the author: a
text ought to be understood according to its original intention. Prima facie this
formulation is awkward, but it can be understood as an extended paraphrase of the
principle of Flavius: the first requirement of interpretations of texts is to grasp the
scopus, the basic intention of the text. The task is, hence, to find a version for the first
canon in the narrower sense without references to the author of the text. The short
Latin version of the first canon can serve as a guideline:
(1) sensus non est inferendus sed efferendus, “the meaning ought not to be brought into the
text from the outside, it ought to be developed out of the text.”

This version is too short. However, connected with the grammatical version of
Schleiermacher’s first canon, it provides a complete version of the first canon that
is sufficient for philology:
(1.a) The text ought not to be understood out of the context of the interpreter. It ought to be
understood out of its own context and out of the context of the contemporary addressees.

A subjective version for the cognitive attitude of the interpreter is as follows:

(1.b) The interpreter ought to recognize pre-judgments arising from her/his own context.
Only a text as an object of the interpreter, and the texts belonging to the context of this text,
is of interest in version (1) of the first canon.

Version (2) is one of the extended versions of Schleiermacher’s grammatical

version of the first canon: the text should be understood according to the original

18
Schleiermacher 1959, p. 101: “Alles, was noch einer näheren Bestimmung bedarf in einer
gegebenen Rede, darf nur aus dem Verfasser und seinem Publikum ursprünglischen Sprachgebiet
bestimmt werden.”
19
See Betti 1967, 220f with many references to Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and other sources.
5.2 The Canons of Hermeneutics: A Critical Re-Examination 113

intention of the author. The understanding of the whole of the text presupposes
according to version (1) the understanding of the text as a whole presupposes the
understanding of the intention, the scopus of the text and not the original intention
of the author. Two problems can be distinguished in Schleiermacher’s extended
version of his first canon. The extension mentions the author but, following Betti’s20
interpretation of its context in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics, it also refers to
Schleiermacher’s extension of his second canon, the canon of the whole and the
parts, to include the context of the biography of the author and in general its
historical context. It will be shown below that the methodological extension can be
understood as a problem of the application of the first canon (1) to the methodical
rules of the different levels of higher hermeneutics.
The reference to the author of a text in the tradition of hermeneutics caused
serious disputes among the methodologists of the nineteenth century and then in
the twentieth century. The main problem for the Nineteenth Century was that the
understanding of the text as a whole presupposes the understanding of the original
intention of the author. The defenders of philology in the narrower sense claimed, on
the one hand, that what is really given for philological interpretations are first of all
texts and not authors as persons with biographies in a foreign past cultural lifeworld.
A text without an author is for the defenders of the philological-historical method,
on the other hand, an empty abstraction. Version (2) has been critizised in the
twentieth century by Gadamer for its “romanticism” and “psychologism.” Hirsch,
following Betti, defended version (2) in his objections against the “banishment of
the author.”21
But neither Gadamer’s position on the one hand, nor the position of Hirsch,
following Betti and Boeckh,22 on the other, can be restricted to the simple
methodological problems of the opposition between the two versions of the first
canon. Without explicitly mentioning the first canon, this methodological aspect of
the two versions already surfaced in the nineteenth century in the critique of Boeckh
by Droysen, and later in the hermeneutics of Blass and especially Birt.23
Some remarks about the three other subjective versions mentioned by Betti are
necessary. They are essential in the context of philology as a discipline, but cause
serious epistemological problems for philology as a science. The context of the
interpreter ought to be in brackets according to version (1) as well as version (2) of
the first canon. In addition, however, to bracket the context of the interpreter implies
that positive applications or negative applications, i.e., rejections, of the truth claims
of the text ought to be bracketed. Applications ought to be bracketed because it
depends on the context of the interpreter whether the truth claim of a text can be
applied or must be rejected by the interpreter. Philological research guided by the
first canon ought not to be interested in the problems of the application or rejection

20
Betti 1967, 222f.
21
Hirsch 1967, ch. 1, “In Defence of the Author.”
22
Hirsch 1967, 24f, 112.
23
Cf. Seebohm 2004, 61ff.
114 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

of the truth of the text; it ought to be interested in the meaning of the text and
to consider its truth claim as a claim of the text, not as a truth for the interpreter.
Interpretation and application are separated.
The first of Betti’s subjective versions is the canon of hermeneutic adequacy: the
interpreter ought to have a harmonious relation to the object of interpretation. The
term “harmonious” implies prima facie that this interest ought to be sympathetic.
However, the canon is ambiguous. It can be understood as a positive reformulation
of the negative and prohibitive subjective version of version (1) of the first canon.
According to a second understanding, the canon requires that the interpreter ought
to agree with the message of the text. This requirement is by no means implied in
the first canon. A text that triggers contempt and rejection in the interpreter can be
just as well be reason enough for being interested in a reliable interpretation of such
texts and for an additional historical interest in their cultural context.24
Betti’s second subjective version is the canon of hermeneutical completion,
which recommends that the interpreter should complete the text if the meaning
of the text is not complete or not clear. But this canon is also plagued by an
ambiguity. According to an often-mentioned understanding, the canon demands
that the interpreter has to understand the text better than the author. This version
is not compatible with the subjective version (1) of the first canon. It makes good
sense that, e.g., for texts belonging to certain meta-genres such as philosophical or
scientific texts, a philosopher or scientist should check after a thorough philological
interpretation of the text whether the judgments of the text provide acceptable or
partially unacceptable information about its subject matter and to offer satisfactory
solutions for problems that have not been solved in the text. But this task is a
task for the philosophical or scientific critique of already established theories,
not the task of the philological interpretation of philosophical or scientific texts.
According to a second philologically meaningful understanding, the canon of
hermeneutical completion requires that the interpreter ought to correct and complete
corrupted texts and text passages. According to the methodology of hermeneutics
in the nineteenth century, this is a task of lower hermeneutical critique. Proposed
corrections or completions are in this case only acceptable if they are compatible
with the requirements of the first canon.
Finally, Betti’s third subjective version is the canon of actualizing the text, i.e.,
the interpreter has to emphasize the value and significance of the text for the present
situation of the interpreter and her/his contemporaries. This canon is obviously
incompatible with both versions of the first canon. It is, however, a meaningful rule
for text interpretations in certain professions. The theologian has to interpret the
holy texts, but the theologian also has to apply the holy text in sermons addressed
to the present situation of the congregation. The judge has to interpret the law, but
it is also the duty of the judge to apply the law to specific cases. Hence the rule has
been and is a meaningful rule for theological and juridical hermeneutics.

24
Christian theologians can be interested in objectively valid interpretations of the rabbinic
literature, but they have to reject it in their own context. One can be interested in the literature
of the Nazis, e.g., in Rosenberg’s Mythos des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, without being a Nazi.
5.3 An Epistemological Analysis of the First Canon 115

The canon of actualizing could, hence, also be called the canon of application.
As such, it was indeed a binding canon for the philologists of Classical Antiquity
and the humanists. It was acceptable for philology as a humanistic discipline.
However, it is not acceptable for the methodology of philological research guided
by the first canon. The first canon is a methodological principle of philological
research. First methodological principles would not be first principles if they admit
any restrictions. The problem of application remains a problem, but it is now the
problem of the application of the results of philological research and the function
of philological research in the present cultural lifeworld. A final solution for the
problem of interpretation and application in the methodology of the human sciences
can only be offered in the conclusions of this investigation.

5.3 An Epistemological Analysis of the First Canon

The first canon is the watershed separating philology as a discipline from philology
as a science. Together with the extended version of Schleiermacher’s second canon
it later served in Dilthey’s and then Betti’s general theory of interpretation as the
first principle of the methodology of the historical human sciences. Seen from
the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology, however, their account is,
incomplete and even partially misleading. The term “context”25 in both versions of
the first canon is ambiguous. Three different types of contexts can be distinguished.
There is (1) the text as the context of the parts of the text. But the text is also given
for the interpreter (2) as a fixed life expression belonging to a past lifeworld. Fixed
life expressions are given as life expressions of an author or authors who created
them in a more or less distant past time phase. A text is, therefore, given (3) in the
context of the tradition of the interpreter, and this means (3.a) in the context of a
tradition of texts in a past reality at the time of its creation and (3.b) in the tradition
of a past lifeworld of the author of the text and her/his biography.
The task is, hence, to distinguish and analyze the three types of contexts and
the two aspects of the third context and their interdependencies in the process of
interpretation. The parts of a text are extensive parts and the text as the context of
its extensive parts is an extensive whole. During the process of the first reading
and (understanding), the parts of a text are given in a temporal sequence one
after the other. The understanding of the parts in reading can be interrupted by
not-understanding and by doubts whether some parts have been understood or
misunderstood. An author of a text who is no longer present as an actual or
potential consociate in the present is not able to defend the text against possible
misunderstandings. Not-understanding and misunderstanding can only be partially
eliminated in a first step by reading and understanding the following passages of the
text. The text is given as an extensive whole after the first reading is finished. At this

25
The German term “Zusammenhang” means a reciprocal system of interdependent elements.
116 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

point, it is an open possibility for a reader to turn back to the text and to start with
a critical check of her/his understanding of certain parts of the text and even of the
text as a whole, i.e., the main intention of the text.
Philological interpretations of texts presuppose critical re-reading after the first
reading is finished. But philological critical re-reading of a text as a whole is not
able to eliminate all partial not-understanding and to discover all misunderstandings.
The interpreter has to look for further information in the broader context. It was
natural for the philologists of Classical Antiquity and later the humanists, but also
for philology as a humanistic discipline in general, that this context was understood
as the tradition of the interpreter. Fixed life expressions in general, and especially
texts, are what they are only in their significance for the present. Interpretation
and application are inseparable for philology as a discipline. The tradition of the
interpreters is the context of the interpreter, and this context is the authority that
decides whether the message of a text must be applied or rejected.
The first task is to explicate the strict separation between the context of the
interpreter and the context of texts as fixed life expressions required by version (1.a.)
of the first canon set forth in Sect. 5.2 above. The main problem of version (1.a.) is
that the term “context” in “the context of the text” and “the context of the interpreter”
is ambiguous. Given this ambiguity, it is tempting to assume with version (2) of
the first canon that the separation ought to be understood as a separation between the
context of the interpreter and the context of the author of the text, the tradition of the
interpreter and the tradition of the author of the text. But the preceding descriptions
have shown that the context of the interpreter has its center in the lived experience
of the interpreter. The “context of a text” is, however, not the context of a lived
experience. It is the intrinsic and extrinsic context of a fixed life expression.
A presently given text, or in general a fixed life expression, is implicitly in
addition an indicator, a trace, of its author or authors. But this indication implies
the author only as an empty, abstract foreign subject and not as a concrete person.
Seen from the viewpoint of version (1) of the first canon, philology is as philology
in the narrower sense, restricted to the interpretation of texts. Of interest for version
(1) of the first canon are only the text and its contextual relations to other texts;
taken together, they are what is given as an object for the interpreter.26 These
contextual relations between texts are referential relations in the broadest sense.
The first epistemological problem of (1) is, therefore, the referential structure of
this context of texts.27
The text by itself is a work belonging to a past reality that still co-presents a
past phase of time, the time of its creation, as an abstract moment. This abstract
moment implies a quasi-temporal structure of the context of the text and its temporal
horizons. What is given in the horizons of such contexts for the cognitive attitude of

26
This has as a perhaps unexpected consequence that the first canon implies a methodological
abstraction. This consequence will be considered in Sects. 5.4, 6.5 and 10.2.
27
Version (2) is, as mentioned, only meaningful for philology in the broader sense, i.e., for
philological-historical research.
5.3 An Epistemological Analysis of the First Canon 117

philology in the narrower sense is a web of other texts. The quasi-past horizon of a
text is its genetic context. It is the context to which the text refers. “Reference” has
to be understood in the broadest sense including, e.g., explicit and implicit quotes,
adoption of literary contents and forms and stylistic and linguistic adaptations, etc.
The quasi-past horizon of a text has the structure of a stemma of texts,28 a structure
of branching roots with many nodes.
The quasi-future horizon of a text is its efficient horizon, the context of texts that
refer to the text.29 The efficient horizon is a stemma standing on its head, i.e., it has
the structure of a branching tree. The explication of the efficient horizon presupposes
the interpretation of the texts in the future horizon. However, such interpretations
are not of significance for the text seen from the aspect of its genetic horizon. The
references of the texts in the efficient horizon to the next in the node between its
genetic and efficient horizon may harbor explicit and implicit interpretations of the
text, but these interpretations are not of interest for philology in the narrower sense.
They will be of interest for philology in the broader sense, i.e., for the interpretation
of the efficient history of the text.
Seen from the viewpoint of version (1) of the first canon, the bracketed past
horizon of the living tradition of the interpreter includes both the genetic and the
efficient horizon of the text without distinguishing between them. The distinction
between the genetic and the efficient history of the text, on the one hand, and the past
horizon of the interpreter, on the other hand, indicates that the simple requirement
of (1) to bracket the context of the interpreter is insufficient. The requirement is that
the interpreter has to separate the context of the text and its genetic horizon from
the interpreter’s own past horizon. This past includes and is influenced not only by
her/his present cultural environment, but also by her/his knowledge of the efficient
horizon of the text.
Hypothetical interpretations of a text taken from this background are false if
they are incompatible with the intrinsic context of the text and/or the context of
texts in the genetic horizon of the text. Interpretations that are compatible with
this background are confirmed. Discoveries of new material in the genetic horizon
of a text are also able to falsify hypothetical interpretations that seemed to be
confirmed in past research. Hypothetical interpretations that are not yet falsified
and not confirmed are open hypotheses that can be falsified in future research.
As a methodological principle for philological interpretations the separation of
the genetic and the efficient horizon of texts in the context of a text imply a
methodological abstraction. In brackets are all texts that belong to the genetic

28
“Stemma” is a term that was originally used to characterize the genetic relations of old
manuscripts. A manuscript has been copied from one or more available other manuscripts, they
depend in turn on manuscripts of an earlier generation, etc. For a more detailed account see
Seebohm 2004, §35
29
This context has been called “efficient history,” Efficient history requires philological-historical
text interpretations that reach beyond the limits of philology in the narrower sense.
118 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

horizon of the interpretation. Only the texts in the genetic horizon of the interpreted
texts belong to the residuum of the abstraction. More about this methodological
abstraction can be said in Sect. 6.3.

5.4 The Application of the First and the Second Canon

to the Interpretation of Fixed Life Expressions

Texts, artifacts, and monuments are fixed life expressions. The task of philology is
the interpretation of texts and the task of archaeology is the interpretation of artifacts
and monuments. The first methodological question is, hence, the application of the
first canon to all levels of hermeneutics mentioned in the doctrine of methods of
philological interpretation. The second question is the possible application of the
first canon to the archaeological interpretation of artifacts and monuments created
in past cultural contexts with and without literary traditions.
The methodological analysis of the first canon and its methodological impli-
cations has used the term “reference” without specifying between different types
of such references. The application of the first canon to the different levels of
interpretations requires distinctions between different types of reference, and with
them, different structures of the genetic horizon of a text. A first consequence of the
application is the transition from philology in the narrower sense to philological-
historical research in different ways on the different levels of interpretation. The
second consequence is that this transition requires a re-examination of the second
canon. The theory of the whole and its parts presupposed in the second canon is
static. The criteria of objective validity of interpretations presuppose not only the
text as a whole and its parts, but also the whole of the context of its genetic horizon
and the context of texts in its future horizon.
The theory of the levels of interpretations in the hermeneutics of Boeckh, Birt,
and Blass in the nineteenth century distinguished lower hermeneutics and higher
hermeneutics. Boeckh distinguishes two levels of lower hermeneutics, the level of
grammatical interpretation and the level of historical interpretation. Grammar and
dictionary, more precisely, “the thesaurus of words and phrases” of a language,30
determine the objective conditions of a text.31 This means, however, that the
methods of the grammatical interpretation of texts presuppose grammar and dictio-
nary, i.e., they presuppose the results of grammatical and lexicographical research.

30
For the sake of brevity, the term “dictionary” will be used as shorthand for “thesaurus of : : : ” in
the following sections.
31
According to Boeckh, the methodical guidelines of interpretations on the lower level are
determined by the objective conditions of a text. Methodical guidelines for the interpretation on
the higher level of hermeneutics refer to the subjective conditions of a text; see Boeckh 1966, 81f;
124f; 140f; (1968, 49f.; 89f; 108f.). The subjective and objective conditions are both conditions
of the text. Betti’s distinction between subjective and objective conditions refers to the canons of
hermeneutics.
5.4 The Application of the First and the Second Canon to the Interpretation. . . 119

Philology as a pre-scientific discipline has used all texts with approximately the
same linguistic background as resources for such research. But it has to be kept in
mind that grammar in this sense had a normative function not only for grammatical
interpretations, but also for the critique of the quality of texts and, last but not least,
for the creative writing of texts.
Given the first canon as the first principle for the methodology of philological
research, the situation is radically different. Historical linguistics is presupposed in
methodologically guided grammatical interpretations of texts. The term “historical
linguistics” indicates that grammatical and lexicographical research has to follow
the methodological principles of the historical human sciences. Grammar and
dictionary are presuppositions of philological interpretations of a text, but as such
they presuppose the research in historical linguistics in this context. The application
of the first canon to the level of grammatical interpretation implies, therefore, the
application of the methodology of history as a science. It requires the transition from
philology in the narrower sense to philological-historical research.
Philological interpretations of a text and the context of texts in its genetic horizon
are vice versa also of significance for historical linguistics. Each of these texts in the
genetic horizon of a text has its own genetic horizon. What has been a set of texts
belonging to approximately the same language is now a quasi-temporal development
and with it a historical development not only of grammatical structures of texts, but
also (and this is of special significance for interpretations of texts) of the meaning
of words. Except for some special cases32 texts together with their genetic and
efficient horizons as quasi-temporal horizons are the material for historical linguistic
research. Grammatical interpretations in philology as a science presuppose the state
of the art of historical linguistics, but such interpretations also offer vice versa
essential contributions for historical linguistics.33
Individual interpretation is the first level of higher hermeneutics in Boeckh’s
methodology. The interpretation of the collected works of an author already implies
the biography of the author, but according to Droysen’s critique the biography of
the author presupposes the historical reconstruction of the biography. Blass and
especially Birt followed Droysen and eliminated the reference to the biography of
the author for individual interpretation on the level of higher hermeneutics.
What is left is the question of the authenticity of the text, i.e., the question
whether it belongs to a group of other texts written by the same author. Only
one criterion is left to decide problems of authenticity, the interpretation and
critique of style. The interpretation of style presupposes the interpretation of the
genre of the text. Individual interpretation is in this case reduced to a special

32
Given early phases of the development of written literary traditions in different languages with
similar structures, comparative research is able to reconstruct the linguistic context of the common
root language of such languages, e.g., the Indo-European languages.
33
A trivial example: It is natural for a naïve interpreter of the twentieth century to understand the
sentence “The lord of the lowlands was a gay person” in a novel of the nineteenth century as “The
lord was a homosexual.” But what was really meant according to the meaning of the word in the
genetic horizon of the novel is “The lord was a person in good spirits.”
120 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

problem of generic interpretation and critique. The problem of the authenticity

of texts can also be answered, and has successfully been answered in some cases
with the aid of statistical investigations of the use of words and smaller parts of
phrases in texts that are supposed to belong to the same author. But in such cases
individual interpretation is reduced to a special problem of lexicographical research
on the level of lower hermeneutics. The conclusion can only be that the objects of
philology in the narrower sense are only texts, and all questions about the author
and her/his intentions and motives are excluded. They are, however, of significance
for philological-historical research, but as the term indicates philological-historical
research presupposes the methodology of historical research. What Boeckh had in
mind was philological-historical research. Blass and Birt had the tendency to reduce
philological research to philology in the narrower sense.
The term “historical” in “historical interpretation” in Boeckh’s methodology
refers immediately to the historical context of the text. This understanding of
historical interpretation implies, however, the application of the results of historical
research. Philological research is, according to Boeckh, philological-historical
research and not only philological research in the narrower sense. As already men-
tioned, Blass and Birt, following Droysen’s critique, eliminated not only Boeckh’s
individual interpretation and critique as the first level of higher hermeneutics, but
also the second level of lower hermeneutics for the same reason. What is left for
historical interpretation and critique for philology in the narrower sense as a science
guided by the first canon is then the “explanation of technical terms and historical
facts” of the theory of the levels of hermeneutics in Classical Antiquity. “Historical”
is understood as belonging to histories as reports about facts in the broadest sense.
Historical interpretation in this sense is reduced to a special branch of lexicography.
The subjective conditions of Boeckh’s individual interpretation and critique
as the first level of higher hermeneutics include information about the author
of a text and her/his biography. But the interpretation and reconstruction of a
biography presupposes historical reconstructions and does not belong to philology
in the narrower sense. The reason behind the banishment of the author in the
hermeneutics of Blass and Birt is, as mentioned, also Droysen’s reason for his strict
methodological distinction between the methodological principles of history and the
methodological principles of philology, more precisely, philology in the narrower
sense.
Prima facie the reasons for the dispute about the “banishment of the author” in
the twentieth century are different. Gadamer rejects the implicit psychologism and
romanticism of Schleiermacher’s version (2) of the second canon. The “original
intention of the author” is a psychological category. Hermeneutics is not interested
in romantic interpretations of the creativity of the author of a text. In contrast, Hirsch
following Betti’s theory of interpretation, writes “in defense of the author.”34 The
simple understanding of a person or the understanding of a person with the support
of some psychological theory presupposes immediate encounters or reports about

34
Hirsch 1967, ch. 1.
5.4 The Application of the First and the Second Canon to the Interpretation. . . 121

immediate encounters. The author of a text is, however, given only as an empty
implication of the text as a fixed life expression. There might be texts that provide
sufficient information for the reconstruction of the person, more precisely of the
biography of the person. However, such a reconstruction presupposes historical
research and with it historical causal explanations. The upshot is that the dispute
about psychologism implies and is implied by the methodological dispute about
Boeckh’s individual interpretation in the nineteenth century. This touches, however,
only one aspect of the problem. The problem of interpretation and application is the
real problem behind Gadamer’s refutation of psychologism.35
What is left for higher hermeneutics is, hence, the analysis of the methodological
application of the first canon to the level of generic interpretation and critique. The
specific type of references of a text to other texts on this level is the quotation of
other texts in the genetic horizon of a text. Different types of quotations can be
distinguished. A text can refer to other texts in its genetic horizon with explicit or
implicit quotations of what has been said by the author of another text. But a text can
also refer to another text by adaptations of certain aspects of the other text without
mentioning the other text or its author. Preferences for certain types of quotes
are different in different meta-genres. Explicit and implicit quotations followed by
positive or negative applications and/or critical comments are often used in prose
literature reporting or researching certain states of affairs, e.g., philosophical, legal,
and scientific literature. Meta-genres like liturgical texts, myths, poetry, and rhetoric
prefer adaptations: relevant are style elements, motives, and plot patterns used in
texts belonging to the genetic horizon of a text. Such texts can be found in the same
genre, but they can also belong to different genres.
The second canon, the canon of the whole and the parts, is, like the first
canon of hermeneutics, a universal methodological principle, and it is of special
significance for the level of grammatical and generic hermeneutics. The canon has
been called the “second canon” because it is the second in Schleiermacher’s list. It
is, however, also second because the application of the first canon to the levels of
interpretation and critique has some serious consequences for the understanding of
the canon of the whole and the parts. The canon of the whole and the parts has
been understood as a general principle for the philological doctrine of methods
since Classical Antiquity. The principle was also somewhat suspicious because it
implied prima facie a vicious circularity. Following Dilthey, the canon of the whole
and the parts has additionally been understood as a methodological principle of
the human sciences in general, and especially the historical human sciences. The
“hermeneutical circle” then finally received the rank of a universal fundamental
ontological principle in the twentieth century as the “circle in understanding” in the
hermeneutics of Being and understanding in general.36

35
Gadamer 1965, part II, section II, 2.c The problem whether interpretation and application
are separable or not has already been mentioned in the introduction and will surface again in
Sects. 6.5 and 10.6.
36
Cf Heidegger 1977, §32 which explicitly says that the hermeneutics of being has nothing in
common with hermeneutics as a method.
122 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

The phenomenological theory of the whole and the parts is, on the contrary, a
formal ontological and logical theory and not a fundamental ontological theory, and
has the advantage that it is not plagued by vicious circularities. The methodology
of the historical human sciences is, therefore, able to avoid the alleged logical
difficulties of the second canon with the aid of a logical explication of the canon
in terms of the phenomenological theory of the whole and the parts.37 Husserl used
the theory of the whole and the parts first of all as a tool for the development of
a pure logical grammar, but it is also possible to apply the theory to grammar
beyond the limits of pure logical grammar. Words by themselves are abstract and not
sufficiently determined moments of concrete meaning on the level of grammatical
interpretations. They reveal concrete meaning only in the context of the structures of
sentences as the concrete wholes of meaning. Sentences and phrases are first-order
wholes of texts as contexts of phrases and sentences. Sentences are connected with
sentences in higher-order wholes of meaning in the parts of a text, and as such are
concrete wholes of the second order. The structure of these second-order wholes is
determined by specific relations and their properties, relations that are one-sidedly
founded in properties of concrete wholes of the first order. Texts as extensive con-
crete wholes are wholes constituted by relations with specific properties between the
parts of the text. Seen from a formal point of view, the rules for literary genres are the
rules for admissible relations between parts of the texts belonging to certain genres.
The theory of the whole and the parts is a static theory. As such it can be used
for the analysis of the application of the second canon to the grammatical and the
generic level of philological interpretations of texts. The second canon as a static
and as such a-historical principle was the basic principle of philology as a discipline.
For philology as a discipline grammar and the system of literary genres have been
understood as normative systems of rules for writing texts, interpreting texts, and
literary criticism. The situation is different for philology as a science with the first
canon as the first methodological principle.
The application of the theory of the whole and the parts is restricted to the
formal explication of a text as an intrinsic whole and its parts. The explication
of the methodological interplay of the first and the second canon requires more.
The second canon by itself cannot be used for a logical explication of the past and
the future horizons of texts required by the first canon. What has to be added is a
phenomenological account of the genesis of wholes and their parts.
Texts as concrete wholes indicate their genesis in their relations to other texts
in the quasi-temporal dimension of their genetic horizon as the extrinsic context
of texts. Texts in the genetic horizon of a text are texts of the same language.
Every text in the quasi-temporal past horizon in the context of a text has its own
quasi-temporal genetic horizon. What is given for grammatical interpretation is
a presently given set of texts, but these texts are quasi-temporally ordered and
represent different aspects of the genetic development of the language used in the
texts. The quasi-temporal relations in the presently pre-given set of texts represent

37
The following analyses presuppose the material of Part I, Sect. 2.2.
5.4 The Application of the First and the Second Canon to the Interpretation. . . 123

the temporal development of the language in the past genetic horizon of a text. But
the text also has a future quasi-temporal horizon, and this horizon ideally includes
the present stage of the development of the language – or even different languages –
of the interpretation. Seen from here the genetic linguistic horizon of a text can be
understood as a concrete temporal, i.e., historical, development of the language of
the text. As already mentioned, the genetic horizon of a text is a context of texts to
which a text refers, and each of these texts in the genetic context of a text has its own
genetic context. Referential relations on the generic levels are quotations, and such
quotations can be explicit or implicit references to parts of other texts or borrowing
motives, plots, stylistic properties, etc., from other texts. The quasi-temporal past
horizon considered by itself represents, as the genetic development of the text in the
historical past horizon of the text. Since each text in the past horizon of a text has
its own genetic quasi-temporal past horizon, and in addition its own future horizon
as its effective aspect, both horizons together represent one aspect in the history of
literature, the history of poetry, of the sciences, the law, and other aspects of the
history of ideas.
The application of the first canon has, however, further advantages. Interpreting
the text as a highest node in the stemma of the context of texts in the genetic horizon
of a text is able to determine the uniqueness and individuality of the text in its
relation to the context of texts in its past horizon. If the future effective horizon of
the text is added, the text appears as a unique text in the context of the history of
texts of a genre that needs ideographic interpretation.
Texts given as unique individual texts imply more than the abstract reference
to an author or authors of fixed life expressions in general. They imply an author
as a unique individual who created the text in a unique phase of her/his life. The
application of the first canon to the second canon on the level of generic interpre-
tation implies in the last instance the biography of the author. The transition from
attempts to transcend philology in the narrower sense with its banishment of the
author to philological-historical research is, therefore, the inevitable consequence
of the application of the first canon to the second canon and its applications to
the levels of lower and higher hermeneutics. The application of the first canon to
the second canon implies the justification for the transition from philology in the
narrower sense to the historical philological method as the method of philology as a
science.
Interpretations of the artifacts of elementary understanding and the monuments
belonging to higher understanding in historical archaeology including cult objects,
statues, paintings, temples, and the complex social relations of cult activities are
able to presuppose philological interpretations of texts and the methods used in
text interpretation. Hence methodologically guided interpretations of historical
archaeology have to apply the first canon. Philology is, therefore, the final arbiter
for the confirmation or falsification of assumed interpretations of artifacts and
monuments in historical archaeology.
No texts are available for the interpretation of fixed life expressions in pre-
historical archaeology. In this case the distinction between artifacts belonging to
124 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

elementary understanding and monuments belonging to higher understanding is

crucial. Methods that can be applied to the interpretation of artifacts have been
mentioned. Such methods presuppose nothing more and nothing less than the
presently available knowledge of the structures of the lifeworld in general and
additional knowledge about the natural environment of the pre-historical culture.
But the presupposition of the general structure of the lifeworld is the presupposition
for the methodological demarcation criteria of the human sciences in general, i.e.,
the systematic human sciences and the historical human sciences. It is, therefore,
also possible that comparative methods used for archaeological interpretations can
refer to the results of ethnology as a systematic human science.
Taken by itself archaeology has no problems in its interpretations of artifacts
belonging to the realm of elementary understanding such as tools, weapons, houses,
fortifications, and traces of agriculture and mining, together with the implied rele-
vant social relations of the members of a past cultural lifeworld and the conditions of
a natural environment. Presupposed in such interpretations are the general structures
of the lifeworld, i.e., the structure of possible activities of the human body, the
structure of the givenness of Others, and the everyday elementary interactions with
Others. Comparative methods are useful for complex cases. This background is
also sufficient for falsifications of the interpretation of such artifacts. So-called
pre-historical cultures in the past are cultures without a written tradition. Only
archaeology can provide interpretations of the artifacts created by such cultures, and
such interpretations will be restricted in the most cases to the structure of elementary
understanding.

5.5 The Application of a Modified Version of the First Canon

to Historical Reconstructions

An answer to the question whether history has specific methodological principles

presupposes reflections on the specific empirical material and the methods used
in historical research. The task of history and its methods is to reconstruct the
past reality of a more or less foreign cultural lifeworld. It is an essential property
of objects given in a lifeworld that they have been understood in the context
of this lifeworld. A historical reconstruction of a past reality is, therefore, per
se an interpretation of a past reality. The presently given empirical materials for
such reconstructions are texts, monuments, and artifacts. Such materials are the
facts for historical research. Historical reconstructions presuppose, hence, the
methodologically guided interpretations of texts, monuments, and artifacts, i.e.,
history as a science presupposes methodological principles of philological and
archaeological interpretations.
Facts for historical research ought to be distinguished from historical facts.
Empirical facts are facts that can be given for present and/or future sensory lived
experience. Facts for the historian are not such empirical facts. Historical facts
are reconstructed facts that have been immediately given as facts in a past lived
5.5 The Application of a Modified Version of the First Canon to Historical. . . 125

experience. Historical facts are, therefore, not immediately given facts. They are
reported facts. To believe in facts reported in an oral and/or written tradition is
natural but naïve. It is always possible to doubt whether it was really the case
that a reported fact really happened in a not present temporal and spatial distance.
Historical research implies, therefore, historical critique, i.e., reported historical
facts are always assumed historical facts that could be falsified by historical
research. The distinction between facts for the historian and historical facts is of
crucial significance for a phenomenological epistemological analysis of a historical
methodology. “Historical fact” is a term for a genus of essentially different kinds of
facts, i.e., events in the natural environment, actions, motives for actions, intended
or not intended consequences of actions, beliefs, habits, customs, social and legal
relations, and cults.
As mentioned in Sect. 4.2, Dilthey suggested that generalized versions of
Schleiermacher’s first and second canon of hermeneutics can be used as universal
methodological principles for the historical human sciences. This suggestion is
prima facie convincing because all historical human sciences presuppose interpre-
tations of fixed life expressions. Critical phenomenological reflections are, however,
able to discover serious additional epistemological problems, especially for history
and historical research. The problems connected with the second canon are easier to
handle and it is, hence, advisable to start with this canon.
Texts as fixed life expressions are usually pre-given for philological inter-
pretations as extensive wholes, and philological research guided by the second
canon starts, according to what has been said above in Sect. 5.4, after the first
reading in which the text is then a vaguely pre-given whole proceeding as a
search for an explication of the parts and the relations between the parts that are
constitutive for the whole as a structured whole of the meaning. The situation of
the historian is not different on the level of the first encounter with the sources
that need philological interpretation. But the methodological approach of history
as a science is not merely interested the interpretation of the sources. It is further
interested in the reconstruction of a past reality presupposing the philological-
historical interpretation of many fixed life expressions and it is finally interested
in the interpretation of the reconstructed historical context and development of a
past reality. Though the difference between interpretation of historical sources and
the second-order historical interpretation of reconstructed real cultural contexts
and their developments is, seen from a methodological and epistemological point
of view, obvious, this difference has never been mentioned in the literature of the
Geisteswissenschaften in the wake of Dilthey including Husserl and Heidegger, or
elsewhere.
The reconstruction of a past real development as a whole is impossible because
even the search for sources, the facts for the historian that offer the material for
reconstructions of the historical facts belonging to a past real development, is
already an indefinitely open process. It is, furthermore, impossible because there
will be never enough material for a complete reconstruction of the past reality of a
cultural lifeworld as a concrete whole. It is, hence, meaningless to apply the canon of
the whole and the parts to the methods of reconstructions of a past real development
126 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

in a real past real lifeworld. It is even questionable whether it can be applied to

interpretations of a reconstructed historical development in a past cultural lifeworld
in the same way in which it can be applied to fixed life expressions in philological
and archaeological interpretations.
The problem behind these difficulties is the structure of the historical temporality
of a real development of historical facts and events, the temporality of historical
research, and the overarching temporal structures connecting them as substructures.
The question is whether an application of the first canon of hermeneutics to
historical research is able to offer a solution for these difficulties. A prima facie
innocent version of the formula for the first canon for philological interpretations
that could be applied to historical facts is, for instance:
A historical fact ought to be reconstructed and interpreted not in the temporal horizons of
actual historical research, but in the temporal horizon of the historical fact in the context
of its past real lifeworld and actual historical research ought to recognize pre-judgments
arising from the context of its own temporal horizons.

Research in history as a science must be distinguished from the representation

of the results of historical research in historical narrations. It is the narration that
offers not merely the reconstruction of a past reality, but also the second-order
historical interpretation of a past reality. History as a science presupposes as one
of its foundations a specific type of the genre “historical narrations.” Essential
for this type is that all historical narrations reporting specific developments of
events or aspects of cultural lifeworlds are understood as partial phases of a
universal temporally ordered narration reporting the “history of humankind” from
its beginnings to the present of the narrator and its future horizon. However, this
type of the genre “historical narration” itself has its generative foundations in the
literary history of the development types of the genre “historical narration.” This
development is of interest for the phenomenological analysis of the structures of
intersubjective temporality in different types of experience of the historical past in
the present as well as possible applications of the first canon of hermeneutics in the
explication of these types of experiences.
The “histories” of Classical Antiquity are originally either (1) simple narrations
about events that are of immediate interest for applications (or rejections) of what
has been reported in the present because they happened in the immediate past
horizon of the present or (2) narrations about deeds and events in the past that are of
immediate moral significance for applications in the present. The next steps are (3)
historical narrations about developments from the “beginning,” the “founding” of a
political community to the present of a community representing the tradition for the
present of the narrator, together with the demand to preserve and apply this tradition
in the future horizon of the present, followed by (4) the development of narrations
of universal histories of salvation in monotheistic religions from the creation of the
world to the present and beyond that to its end in the future. The historical narration
in (4) is restricted to a selection of events that are of significance for the prophetic
promise of salvation in the future. Interpretation and application are, hence, again
inseparable in this type of the literary genre of historical narrations.
5.5 The Application of a Modified Version of the First Canon to Historical. . . 127

The final step (5) in this development of historical narrations is the idea of a
universal world history as a history of the progress of the enlightenment of human
mankind from the beginning in the past in cultures without sciences to enlightened
cultures with sciences. The historical narrative immediately implies the demand that
contemporaries in the present ought to apply the principles of enlightenment in their
intellectual and social activities. Interpretation and application are not separated.
The epistemologically interesting step in this development of historical narra-
tions is the step from (2) via (3) to (4) and finally (5). The narration in (4) and
(5) does not merely have the character of reporting a short series of events that is
of immediate applicative interest for the present; what is of interest is the whole
series of events from the beginning of humankind to its end in the present and its
future horizon in a ordered and dense temporal sequence. History is understood as a
universal history that implies all partial historical narrations as its parts. The second
canon is implicitly presupposed in such universal histories, but at the cost of the first
canon, because such universal histories are determined throughout by a strict unity
of interpretation and application. The past is of interest only to the extent to which
it is of significance for present activities.
Connected with this step is a second epistemologically relevant aspect in the step
first to (4) and then to (5). Modern representations of history as universal history
have been able to refer to annals and chronicles. Annals and chronicles report what
happened at their time in the temporal sequence of the years, and can be used later
by historians as sources for the reconstructions in their historical narratives. Thus
in such cases annals and chronicles immediately determine as sources the order of
the narrations of historians as temporal sequences. The form of the report in annals
as a year after year sequence can always be extended beyond the limits of reported
events in the annals in a formal “and so on” to the present of the historian. The idea
of universal history is constituted in the idea of an always pre-given formal and-
so-on, and it is the task of historians to fill these empty temporal phases with their
findings in other sources and to order them according to the sequence.
The formal structure of the representation of time as a two-dimensional linear
sequence with a past and future dimension for the time phases of the past present,
the actual present, and the future present of facts, real events, is the immediate
foundation, the condition of the possibility, of distinguishing and separating the
context of historical reconstructions and interpretations and the context of the
historical facts in a reconstructed phase of a past historical development. The
versions of the first canon of pre-scientific hermeneutical doctrines are methodical
rules for the interpretations of texts in a doctrine of methods.
The version that is relevant for philology as a science is the basic principle of the
methodology for the interpretation of texts in the context of texts. In this version
the structure of temporality is of significance only because the quasi-temporal
horizons referring to other texts in the context mirror the abstract structures of
temporal ordering. The version of the first canon that serves as a principle of the
philological-historical method includes, beyond the contexts of texts, the contexts
of the biographies of the authors of texts, and with this their cultural environments.
128 5 History as a Science of Interpretation

This version implies an awareness of the historical temporal distance between the
context of the interpreter and the context of the text and its author, and this awareness
is the justification for the universal version of the first canon that Dilthey had in
mind. There are, however, further implications that have been neglected by Dilthey
and others.
As a reconstruction of a past reality, history as a science is not restricted to
the problem of interpretation, and it is also not restricted to the question whether
or not this or that is a historical fact or not. The reconstruction of a past reality
implies the reconstruction of the web of relations between different kinds of facts
and their place in the temporal order of historical developments. That history is
interested in the reconstruction of the temporal development of a past real lifeworld
has certain consequences. The first consequence is that the temporal horizons of
historical facts are not, like the quasi-temporal horizons of a text for philology,
temporal because they mirror abstract structures of temporal ordering. The temporal
horizons belong to the concrete temporal ordering of facts in a past reality. A real
past time phase or period is a real past time period in the past horizon of a present
real time phase. The contents of the past phase are foreign and only incompletely
represented in the present. The representation of temporal developments in annals
and chronicles, and other sources with immediate references to temporal structures
and the representation of historical developments in (5) presuppose, furthermore,
the representation of time as calendar time, and this formal representation of time
presupposes time “as the number of movement of celestial bodies.”
This explication of the temporal structures of history is of significance for the
analysis of the possibility of the application of the first canon of hermeneutics
in historical reconstructions and interpretations of historical developments in a
past cultural lifeworld, and in general for the philological-historical method. It
is of significance for this analysis because this structure of temporality is a
necessary partial structure and foundation not only of the context of the historical
reconstructions and interpretations of a past reality but also of the context of the
temporal horizons of past real contexts and historical facts of the past reality and
its developments. Finally it determines also the understanding of the meaning of
“temporal distance” between the context of the interpreting reconstruction and the
reconstructed reality. This temporal distance is, therefore, the necessary condition
of the possibility of the application of the first canon in historical research, and
with it, the possibility of historians to be the “disinterested observers” of historical
developments that is required by the first canon.
Calendar time as a system of orientation is an essentially partial structure and
is already inseparable from the structures of elementary understanding of practical
interactions in the earliest phases of the generation of cultural lifeworlds with and
even without a literary tradition. The temporal structures of the lived experience of
predecessors in the past are equal to and connected with, the temporal structures
of lived experience in the present. This implies that all social interactions in the
5.5 The Application of a Modified Version of the First Canon to Historical. . . 129

encounter with the natural environment in a concrete lifeworld imply the temporal
structure of intersubjective temporality as a universal structure in which the web of
facts is given.
The structure of intersubjective temporality is a necessarily dependent part of
the general structure of the immediate encounter with the natural environment
and the immediate secondary understanding of Others in social interactions on
the level of elementary understanding. It is, therefore, impossible to bracket that
these structures can be included in the bracketing of the own context that is
required by the first canon. This sounds prima facie awkward in the context
of the discussion of history, of the philological-historical sciences in general, of
hermeneutics, and of interpretation in the last century. However, these discussions
simply neglected certain methods of reconstructions and interpretations that have
been and are essential for archaeological interpretations. The meaning of tools
and in general artifacts as fixed life expression can be “understood” in a quasi-
experimental reconstruction of how these tools and artifacts have been used in the
past, a reconstruction carried out in the in the present of the interpreter.
The consequences of the foregoing analyses for the application of the first canon
in historical research can be summarized as follows: it is not possible to apply the
first canon of philological hermeneutics requiring the separation of the context of the
interpreter and the context of the interpreted texts or life expressions in general to
the general structures of intersubjective temporality and elementary understanding
in historical research and philological-historical research. These structures must be
presupposed and cannot be bracketed in the reconstruction of past reality on the
level of elementary understanding. However, the first canon can be and must still
be applied to reconstructions and interpretations of contexts that imply impacts of
the system of first-order higher understanding in a past real cultural lifeworld. Thus
in its application in the methodology of philological-historical research, the first
canon also implies a methodological abstraction that needs further analyses in the
summary in Sect. 6.5.
A final point has to be mentioned. The structures of elementary understanding
imply, as shown in Sect. 3.3, an elementary understanding of causal connections.
Presupposing what has been said up until now, it can be expected that further
analyses can provide the epistemological justification for the methods of causal
explanations that are applied in historical research for events that happened in a
past lifeworld. A caveat has to be added. The future horizon in a lived experience
in the present is open. Expectations and predictions can be fulfilled or disappointed.
The future horizon of a historically reconstructed past present is closed. The space
for expectations in a present phase of a past lifeworld has been filled by events
that happened in the past. Predictions are meaningless in this context, but causal
explanations for past events are possible. The real problem of the next chapter will
be the epistemological analysis of the methods and the different types of causal
explanations in historical research.
Chapter 6
Causal Explanations in History

6.1 Logical Structures of Causal Explanations in History

Several famous essays and chapters in books about historical explanations have been
published in the last century in the tradition of Analytic philosophy. The general
thesis is that the solution of the methodical problems of historical explanations is
sufficient for the answer to the question whether history is a science or not. The
first and last strictly logical analysis of historical explanations was developed as a
kind of postscript to analytic philosophy of science in its heyday.1 The theses of this
analysis can be summarized as follows:
(1) The logical structures of historical explanations and explanations in the natural
sciences are the same.
(2) Historical explanations differ from explanations in the natural sciences only
because the causal laws used in history are often borrowed from pre-scientific
everyday experience. They admit exceptions and are, therefore, only probable.2
(3) Genetic explanations in history can be traced back to this model.3
(4) History assumes these causal laws. Facts, not these laws, are the problem of
history.
(5) Therefore an analysis of the logical structure of historical explanation can
ignore the problems of the discovery of historical facts in historical research.
What is said in (5) is more than a weak spot in the strictly analytic treatment of
the epistemological problems of the human sciences. Critical reflections on reports
about results in the natural sciences cannot serve as a surrogate for epistemological

1
The radical version of this theory was first presented in Hempel 1942; cf. Popper 1960, 1962;
Nagel 1961, ch. 15.
2
See Popper 1960, and Nagel 1961, 551f.
3
See Nagel 1961, 558ff.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 131

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_6
132 6 Causal Explanations in History

reflections on research in the human sciences. The analytic interpretation of

historical explanations was later also a target for the critical objections of the
philosophy of ordinary language4 against the analytic philosophy of language.
Historical narrations use written natural language.5 If a logical analysis of historical
explanations is possible at all, then it has to use a logic that has to presuppose the
linguistic analysis of natural language, and especially its analysis of the argument
forms and rhetorical figures used in natural language.6
Meanwhile, the semantics of possible worlds has developed several formalized
logical models that deviate from classical logic. The application of these models to
certain material regions is difficult, but it can also be said that the semantic model of
classical logic has more difficulties in this respect than the semantic possible world
models.7 The problem of the application of the models of so-called post-classical
modal logics to arguments and explanations in natural language is that each model
can be applied to some cases but not to others. There are, for instance, as many kinds
of arguments as there are conditionals, including classical, counterfactual, exact
and variably exact, and deontological conditionals as well as conditionals implying
temporal relations. A system for all possible models has a certain formal theoretical
value,8 but it is not of practical significance for the logical analysis of all of the
arguments and explanations used in natural language.
It is, nevertheless, possible to find, at least with regard to specific regions, a list of
rules of deduction that are valid in all models9 or at least exhibit only insignificant
variations in the transition from one model to another. The modus ponens (MP),
universal elimination (UE), and universal instantiation (UI) belong to that list, and
these deduction rules are precisely the relevant deduction rules for the analytic
analysis of historical explanations. Thus the logical and then the epistemological
interpretation of historical explanations proposed in the analyses of the analytic
philosophy of science can serve as a point of departure in this chapter. The task of
this chapter is then to develop, step by step, the necessary corrections and extensions
of a new account for historical explanations. The necessary transitions, especially
for temporally determined relations and counterfactuals, have to be determined.
Some of the main leading viewpoints for the corrections and extensions have been
already prepared in the previous chapters.

4
The preferred term “natural language” will be used in this chapter and later instead of “ordinary
language.” The language not only of poetry but also of philosophical and other discourses,
especially the discourse of historiography, belongs to natural languages (plural!), but it is not the
idiom of the ordinary language of everyday interactions and communications.
5
The classic is Scriven 1959.
6
Toulmin 1958. follows in his logic the leading ideas of Strawsons conception of logic.
7
See Tragesser 1977, 25, 90ff.
8
Lewis 1973, esp. 118ff.
9
One of the minimal requirements is that the modus ponens remain valid for conditionals. See
Lewis 1973, 9, 26f.
6.1 Logical Structures of Causal Explanations in History 133

Historical presentations are a special case of the use of natural language.

The literary genre for such presentation is historiography, the genre of historical
narrations, the reports about historical facts. According to the classical analytic
interpretation, history is about facts and historical research is restricted to the task
of discovering the facts, the events that happened in the past. Historical narrations
presuppose the presently available results of historical research and historical
critique, but historical narrations will also be subject to historical critique in the
future and the critique followed by further historical research. According to points
(4) and (5) in the summary of the analytic interpretation of historical explanations
at the beginning of this section, this dimension is irrelevant for the analysis of such
explanations.
Of interest are only the logical structures and the justifications for the pre-
supposed generalized conditionals of historical explanations in historical reports.
The “because” of historical explanations is the “because” indicating a deduction
starting with the generalised conditional and the cause of the explanation in the
premises. The inference applies UI and MP, and the conclusion determines the
explained singular historical fact with MP from the universal instantiation of the
generalized conditional. It could be said against this interpretation that conditionals
in the present tense in natural language of the form “if : : : then : : : ” are usually
transformed to “because of : : : it happened that : : : ” in the past tense. Seen from
a logical and epistemological point of view, the analytic interpretation of the
“because” is acceptable, but it is also a simplification that needs extensions and
corrections.
The preferred connective in primitive narrations about past real events and facts
is the “and.” Several types of such conjunctions can be distinguished. One type
of the “and” used in natural language has all the logical properties of the “&”
of formalized logic. This “and” connects statements about facts without implying
temporal relations of facts in the past but this a-temporal “and” is irrelevant for
narrations in general and especially for narrations of what happened in the past.10
The relevant types of the “and” used in historiographies are the “and” of coexistence
and the historical “and.” The “and” of coexistence connects two or more facts that
coexisted in the same limited period of time. The historical “and” connects two
events that happened in a time sequence.
The “and” of coexistence can be abbreviated as <&>. The symbols “<” and
“>” indicate the temporal limits of coexistence. It shares all the logical properties
of the &, but the statements connected with this “and” are true together only
in a restricted time period and false in all others. The historical “and” connects
statements about facts that happened in a temporal order. The fact mentioned in the
first conjunct exists before the second regardless of whether it continues to exist
after the emergence of the facts in the second conjunct together with the second
or vanishes if the second emerges. &> can be used as a shorthand symbol for

10
For instance: Caesar was the dictator of Rome and Stalin was the general secretary of the
Communist Party in the Soviet Union.
134 6 Causal Explanations in History

this meaning of “and.” The &> implies a transitive and asymmetrical temporal
relation, and therefore some logical properties of statements connected by & are
valid for &>.
Of crucial significance is that commutation does not hold for &>.11 Sentences
connected by &> in primitive historical narratives are candidates for causal
explanations. In this case &> will be replaced by “because.” This “because” is an
abbreviation for presupposed derivations with either the condition in the premises
and the effect in the conclusion or the conditional between two singular facts. The
transition from the historical “and” to the “because” requires the replacement of
&> by the conditional arrow ! of formalized logic. This substitution is not without
problems. The order of the antecedent and the consequent in the presupposed gener-
alized implicative conditional and the derivable implicative conditional connecting
two singular facts preserve the temporal order of the &>. But the negation of
the fact mentioned in the antecedent of the transposition is the consequent of the
original conditional and vice versa. The order of the antecedent and the consequent
in the transposition is the reverse of the temporal order of the facts mentioned in the
antecedent and the consequent.12
“Because” is only one of the indicators of explanations used in historical
narrations. Of crucial significance is also the “only because.” Following what has
been said about the function of implicative conditionals for historical explanations
one should assume that such explanations presuppose replicative conditionals of the
form “A, only if B” or “Only if B, A.” Introductions to formalized logic recommend
translating sentences with “only if” in front as the antecedent of a replicative
conditional in the language of formalized logic, i.e., as “A B.” This proposal
again causes difficulties.
Logic is a-temporal. Therefore a replicative conditional “A B” can be replaced
by the equivalent implicative conditional “B ! A.”13 This conditional is the reverse
of the temporal order of the facts required by the underlying historical “A & >B” but

11
It is, of course, possible to give a formal logical definition of <&> and &> in the framework of
a predicate logic with relations. Let A and B be predicates for two events, let T be the predicate
“limited period of time,” and let F be the predicate “following in time,” and I the predicate “happens
in,” then:
< & >D df W .Ex/ .Ey/ .Ev/ .Ax & By & Tv & Ixv & Iyv/

& >D df W .Ex/ .Ey/ .Ev/ .Ew/ ...Ax & By & Tv & Tw/ & Ixv & Iyw/ & Fww/

It is easier to construct such definitions in the framework of time logic but such logics
presuppose the accessibility relations between possible worlds on the meta-level. Nothing is really
gained for the problem of translating expressions of relations in natural languages into an equally
universal formalized language.
12
Aa ! Ba WW Ba ! Aa .TR/ :
13
A B WW B ! A:
6.1 Logical Structures of Causal Explanations in History 135

the temporal order will be saved in the transposition of the replicative conditional.
The conditional arrow of a-temporal logic indicates the order of logical condition
and the logically conditioned. Hence the temporal order of the facts mentioned in
the antecedent and the consequent in the logical equivalence is irrelevant, and the
conditional arrow is even useful because the amount of connectives and deduction
rules of formalized logic can be simplified. However, the real conditions and their
effects in historical explanations are temporally determined. The reverse of their
temporal order creates meaningless sentences.
Some examples taken from possible historiographies can illustrate what has been
said. Whether examples can prove its mettle against possible historical critique is not
relevant for the logical analysis of the “because” or the “only because” in historical
narrations:
(1) Cleopatra died because she poisoned herself with a snakebite.
The generalized conditional in the background is:
0
(1 ) All people, if they poison themselves with a snakebite, will die.
In this case the conditional is an implicative conditional. The required temporal
order of condition is saved. The transposition of the sentence would be:
(100 ) If Cleopatra did not die she has not poisoned herself.
This sentence is meaningless in a historical context. The temporal order of the
real condition and the real conditioned is the reverse of the temporal sequence of
real cause/effect relations.
There are cases in which implicative conditionals cannot be applied. Backed by
a historical “and” in the sentence “Caesar crossed the Rubicon and became dictator
of Rome,” a historiography reports:
(2a) Caesar became dictator of Rome because he crossed the Rubicon.
To assume a generalised implicative conditional in the background of this causal
explanation is historical nonsense and even an obvious empirical falsehood:
(2a0 ) All people who crossed the Rubicon became dictators of Rome.
Prima facie a replicative conditional works better:
(2b) Ceasar became dictator of Rome only because he crossed the Rubicon.
The presupposed replicative conditional:
(2b0 ) Only if Ceasar crossed the Rubicon could he become dictator of Rome.
can be derived from the generalized replicative conditional:
(2b00 ) All people: only if they cross the Rubicon will they be dictators of Rome by
universal instantiation.
136 6 Causal Explanations in History

Even this is still an obvious falsehood. But the transposition of the replicative
conditional causes no problems and sounds more elegant:
(2b000 ) Without crossing the Rubicon Caesar could not been dictator of Rome.
Given the difficulties surfacing with the examples (2a) and (2b), it is useful
to consider the following extended account of the event in a possible historical
narration:
Caesar was commander in chief of a victorious army. He crossed the Rubicon with his army.
After that, his army had free access to Rome. In doing so Caesar violated the law that no
commander in chief ought to cross the Rubicon with his army. The purpose of the law was
to keep commanders in chief from forcing the Senate to do what a commander wants, first
of all to grant him dictatorship.

What this extended historical narration adds is a report about the historical
circumstances. Historical circumstances are more or less significant additional
conditions existing together with the explained event, but also before and partially
after the event mentioned in the report in sentences connected by <&>, the “and” of
coexistence.14 The understanding of the circumstances helps to understand why the
action in question, crossing the Rubicon, can count as the cause of the effect. The
circumstantial real conditions restrict the possible applicability of the generalized
conditional (2b0 ) “All people: only if they cross the Rubicon will they be dictators
of Rome given the historical circumstances mentioned above.” The universality of
such generalized conditionals is restricted by the limits of a certain time period,
but within those limits, their universality is by no means similar to the probable
generalizations of everyday experience.
Historical circumstances are also of significance for the question whether
counterfactual conditionals are of significance for the logical analysis of historical
explanations. Most historians reject counterfactuals like “what would be the case if
something else had not been the case” as idle speculations. Prima facie this rejection
is well grounded, because the crucial deficiency of most historical counterfactuals
is the tacit assumption of a historically impossible set of historical circumstances
connected with an assumed historical cause by <&>. According to a well-known
example different speculations about the consequent of counterfactuals with the
antecedent “If Caesar had been the commander in chief of the American forces
in the Korean War” are possible. It is possible to conclude either “he would have
used catapults” or “he would have used the atom bomb,” depending on the tacitly
assumed set of circumstantial conditions.
The meta-linguistic theory of counterfactuals in models of the semantics of
possible worlds15 saved at least some classically valid inference rules for logical

14
The logical function of “historical circumstances” in a genuine historical explanation is an
analogue of the “initial conditions” in the methodology of experiments in the natural sciences.
15
The meta-linguistic interpretation is not able to deal with the difference between strict and
variable strict conditionals, i.e., counterfactuals. See Seebohm 1977, 14, n. 36. Lewis 1973. has
given a meaningful formal interpretation of such conditionals in his semantics of possible worlds.
6.2 General Epistemological Structures of Historical Causal Explanations 137

deductions16 and is able to give a rule of thumb for separating meaningful from
meaningless counterfactuals. Counterfactuals are meaningful if the possible world
in question differs from ours only with respect to very few facts that exist in our
world but do not exist in the other world and vice versa. Thus it makes some sense
to say that “If Caesar had been poisoned after crossing the Rubicon, he would
have had no chance to become dictator of Rome.” Counterfactuals are meaningless
if they presuppose possible worlds that are incompatible with our world because
they are different from our world in many respects. The example mentioned above
about Caesar as commander in the Korean War can be used as well as an example
of such meaningless counterfactuals. However, even this logical interpretation is
not a satisfying argument against the rejection of counterfactuals in the context of
historiographies. The task of the historian is the reconstruction of a past actual world
and not of a possible world.
The real problem is that the assumed circumstances for the counterfactual are
usually the tacit assumption of the combination of an arbitrary selection of a
temporally restricted period and another set of circumstances restricted to another
historical period for the counterfactual. But such an assumption is impossible for
the requirement that all the circumstances of the causal relation must be connected
by <&> in a meaningful historical explanation.
Only one special type of counterfactuals is able to satisfy this logical and
epistemological requirement, and is therefore admissible in historiographies. With
the transposition of a replicative conditional in natural language, e.g., in example
(2b000 ) “Without crossing the Rubicon Caesar had not have been dictator of Rome,”
the more elegant version of “If Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon he could not
have become the dictator of Rome,” the real conditions and the conditioned effects
are the same and, as already mentioned above, their temporal order is saved.

6.2 General Epistemological Structures of Historical Causal

Explanations

Logic is a-temporal. However, the problems of epistemology are embedded in the

concrete temporal dimensions of the lifeworld. Two problems already emerged
in the margins of the last section, the problem of the epistemological status of
generalized conditionals and the problem of the status of real conditions and of
real causes.
Several types of generalized conditionals can be distinguished. On the one hand,
there is the strict universality of generalized judgments “a priori” belonging to the
ideal objects of the formal sciences, first of all logic and mathematics. On the
other hand there are three kinds of empirical generalized conditionals beginning

16
What remains possible with respect to valid forms of deduction is, of course, very little; cf. Lewis
1973, 26f.
138 6 Causal Explanations in History

with the generalized conditionals in natural sciences. The specific epistemological

nature of such conditionals will be considered in Sects. 7.2 and 8.1. A second
kind is drawn from everyday experience: that things have always (or in the most
cases) behaved in a certain way in the past leads to the expectation that they will
behave in similar ways in the future is the warrant for the weak universality of
probable generalized conditionals given in everyday experience. Finally, there are
the temporally restricted generalized conditionals.
According to the analytic interpretation of historical explanations, historiography
has to “borrow” its generalized conditionals from natural sciences or everyday
experience. This is correct for example (1) in the previous section. It did not work
for example (2). A less complex example is:
(3) The German legal system was influenced by the code civile because (or: only
because) Germany was conquered by Napoleon.
The generalized conditional justifying (3) is:
0
(3 ) For all European countries: The legal systems of these countries have been
influenced by the code civile if (or: only if) the country was conquered in the
Napoleonic wars.
(30 ) has some special properties:
– It is true for a limited set of historical facts17 ;
– it is true for a limited time in the past;
– it is, therefore, not of significance for the present, and can neither be justified nor
rejected by present experiences; and
– its truth claim can be justified by historical research only by checking, for all
relevant cases, whether or not the generalized conditional is applicable.
The historical explanation in example (3) is a genuine causal historical expla-
nation, and the presupposed generalized conditional is a restricted generalized
historical conditional. The question left is why it is possible for (3) to use the
generalized replicative conditional for the justification of the “only because” in this
historical explanation. To find an answer for cases like (3) is easy. The temporal
limits for the truth of (30 ) are mentioned in its antecedent, “in the Napoleonic wars,”
and historical research can show that the legal systems of European countries not
conquered by Napoleon in this time period, e.g., Britain and Russia, were not
influenced by the code civile in this time period. Such a simple answer is not
possible for genuine historical explanations if the temporal limits of the truth
claim of the presupposed generalized conditionals are hidden in the circumstantial
real conditions and not explicitly mentioned in the antecedent of the generalized
conditional as in example (2).

17
Everyday experience justifies many strict but restricted generalized conditionals for finite sets of
facts, e.g.,: all horses owned by farmer Smith are black. (x) ((Hx & Oxs) ! Bx). The relation Oxs
implies and indicates the restriction.
6.2 General Epistemological Structures of Historical Causal Explanations 139

Some introductions to logic propose calling conditions in the antecedent of

replicative conditionals “necessary” conditions without distinguishing between log-
ical and real conditions or causes. The conditions in the antecedents of implicative
conditionals are called “sufficient” conditions. Quite apart from whether or not this
makes sense for logical conditions, it is insufficient and even misleading for real
necessary or sufficient conditions and real necessary or sufficient causes.
Prima facie it could be said that real causes with certain properties are necessary
causes for their effects if and only if it is impossible for causes with other properties
to produce the same effect. Causes are sufficient causes if their effect can also be
the effect of causes with other properties. This is still insufficient. What has been
said by John Stuart Mill and more recently by Karl Popper about experiments in the
natural sciences can be used as a guiding thread for a satisfying account of a precise
distinction between necessary and sufficient real causal factors.
The task of an experiment is to test a hypothesis, i.e., a generalized conditional
assuming a certain cause for a certain effect. The experimenter must first determine
the set of the initial conditions in the experimental situation and then add an addi-
tional condition. The experiment is successful if the effect of adding this condition
fits the prediction of the hypothesis. Given the presupposed set of initial conditions,
the added condition is a necessary cause if and only if no other added condition
to the presupposed experimental situation is able to produce the predicted effect
of the hypothesis. The added condition is a sufficient cause if this is not the case.
The question whether some of the initial conditions are only sufficient or whether
at least some of them are necessary conditions can then be answered in additional
experiments.
A report about the essential facts of a successful experiment is an analogue
of historical reports in historical narrations. Returning to the extended version of
example (2) in Sect. 5.4, it can be said that the counterpart of the added real
condition, the cause in the historical report, is Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon,
and that the initial conditions are the counterparts of the historical circumstances
or circumstantial conditions of Caesar’s action. According to the “only if” of the
historical report Caesar’s action is a necessary cause. Given the circumstantial
conditions no other action of Caesar could have caused the effect he desired.
However, the real cause mentioned in the sentence with the “because” in front in
example (1) is given the historical circumstances, a sufficient cause. Other poisons
were available for Cleopatra given her historical situation.
A historical report as an analogue of a report about a successful experiment is
similar to the report about an experiment in some respects, but it is different in
others. Comparing both types of reports, the main difference is that the report about
an experiment talks about facts that have happened in the past phase of the actual
present and can be repeated in a future phase of the actual present. The historical
report is, however, a report about historical facts, facts that happened in the past
present of a past reality.
A report presupposes empirical investigations about facts. Investigations in the
sciences in general presuppose methodologically guided research. The facts of
methodologically guided experimental research are given under the abstractive
140 6 Causal Explanations in History

reduction from essential aspects of the lifeworld required by the methodology

of the natural sciences. The discovery of historical facts in historical research
presupposes the reconstruction of a past reality. The materials for the reconstruction
of the past reality are the facts given for the historian in the present. The real
conditions of a past lifeworld (and with them the possibility of causal explanations in
history) are either historical facts or refer to historical facts. Historiographic reports
offer sufficient material for the logical and also partially for the epistemological
analysis of historical explanations. But the crucial epistemological problems are the
problems of historical research and critique. The next task is, therefore, an analysis
of the types of givenness of real causes and real conditions in the lifeworld.

6.3 The Typology of Real Conditions and Its Significance

for the Methodology of Causal Explanations in History

The category “condition” is also of significance for the discussion of epistemologi-

cal and methodological reflections on history and the social sciences. The problem
of levels of types of real conditions presupposing each other in a hierarchical
order emerged in the end of the eighteenth century.18 That changes on the level
of technology and economy triggered changes in legal and political structures was
obvious after the French revolution. The new discovery was a significant factor
for the development of the social sciences, but it was also of crucial significance
for the methodology of historical research. Technological and economic material
conditions and structures determine material legal and political systems and their
ideological superstructures in Marx’s historical materialism. According to Droysen,
material conditions or causes must be distinguished from formal conditions or
powers, and both must be distinguished from efficient causes in history.19 Material
conditions or causes are as follows: (1) nature and the changes of nature caused by
human technologies and activities in general; (2) human beings as creatures, i.e., as
biological entities, including anthropology, ethnology, races, and mixtures of races
and the growth, spread and distribution of the human races; (3) the specific cultural
circumstances as results of past human activities; and (4) human purposes, passions,
and interests as motives and drives, especially of the masses. Formal conditions or
moral powers, as Droysen called them, are (1) the natural communities: the family;
the neighborhood; the tribe; and the nation as well as (2) the ideal communities:
communication and languages; the beautiful and the arts; truth and the sciences;
and the holy and the religions. Along with the practical communities: the society;
the commonweal; law and justice; and power and state as the common denominators
of all factors mentioned.

18
Systems of types of real conditions must be distinguished from systems of categories of the social
sciences, e.g., the system of Weber’s categories. Cf. Grünewald 2009, 97ff on Weber’s theory of
categories of understanding sociology.
19
Droysen 1977, 436f; for a detailed account of Droysen’s position cf. Seebohm 2004, 69ff.
6.3 The Typology of Real Conditions and Its Significance for the Methodology. . . 141

Neither Droysen nor Marx (nor anybody else to the best of my knowledge)
has given a convincing analysis of the epistemological status of the dependencies
or interdependencies between such strata of real conditions. The material level of
economic conditions is for so-called vulgar Marxism a substructure determining
the powerless superstructure of power systems and their ideologies. Sophisticated
dialectical Marxism talks about material “dialectical” relations between material
conditions and ideologies. The goal of Droysen was to avoid philosophical concepts
in his methodological reflections on historical research. Nevertheless, he implicitly
applies the Aristotelian categories of material, formal, and efficient causes and
he uses Hegelian categories in his classification of the moral powers. Droysen’s
efficient factors, the “workers,” i.e., human actions and actors, could be understood
as “causes” in the sense of historical causal explanations. But Droysen’s thesis that
the driving force behind the actions and actors is the striving for freedom is again
similar to the idealistic Hegelian thesis that the final goal of history is the realization
of freedom, a goal beyond the limits of possible methodological and epistemological
investigations.
The first task for the present investigation is, therefore, to give an explication of
the meaning of “types of real conditions.” The second task is to present a sketch of a
typology of real conditions and of the order in which the types determine or modify
each other. The third task is the epistemological analysis of the methodological
significance of this typology for historical explanations.
The explication of the meaning of “types of real conditions” has to distinguish
between real causal conditions, real factors that cause a real effect (including the
real circumstantial factors that are relevant for the causation in a causal relation),
on the one hand, and on the other hand, types of real conditions. Real factors in
causal relations are singular facts, singular events or actions. The circumstantial
real factors of a singular real causation are sets of real factors belonging to different
types of real conditions, e.g., all the circumstantial real factors of Caesar’s crossing
the Rubicon: his victories, his psychological dispositions, the legal situation,
the political situation in the Roman Senate, etc. Seen from the viewpoint of
a phenomenological epistemology a type of real conditions is as an ideal type
given in eidetic intuition.20 It is given in eidetic intuition as a structural whole of
conditions that can appear in sensory experience as causal factors: technological
conditions, economic conditions, legal conditions, etc. It is, hence, possible to derive
generalized conditionals from certain aspects or properties of an ideal type.
A typology of real conditions is an ordered system of ideal types of real
conditions. The order of the system is determined in a hierarchy of generative
and static foundational relations. Higher-order types presuppose the givenness of
the lower levels, but the existence of lower levels is by itself not a sufficient and
necessary determination for the existence of specific factors belonging to the next
higher level. In the case of levels of foundations, the logical relation between

20
Cf. Sect. 2.3; a detailed analysis of the givenness of the ideal types that are presupposed in the
social sciences will be given in Part IV, Sect. 10.4.
142 6 Causal Explanations in History

the condition and the conditioned is the replicative conditional: certain types of
technological and economic conditions are given only if a certain type of natural
environment is pre-given.21 Thus it can be said that a certain type of environmental
condition is the necessary condition for a certain type of technology, and that this
type of technology is, in turn, the necessary condition for a certain type of economic
social relations.
Strict empiricism is not able to satisfy the intuitive evidence of the givenness of
the necessity of the conditional relations between lower and higher levels of types.
The phenomenological theory of the whole, the parts, and the foundational relations
between parts and abstract moments in concrete wholes, along with the theory of the
constitution of material ideal types in eidetic variations is able to provide a better
answer.22 The levels of the types of real conditions are as follows:
(1) The changes in the conditions of the natural environment of the lifeworld.
(it is not essential but practical to distinguish between (1.a) conditions belong-
ing to the external environment in the strict sense and (1.b) external conditions
that can be called internal because they belong to the physiology of the human
body.)
(2) the development of technologies on the level of elementary understanding;
(3) the development of economic conditions and systems;
(4) the contents and structures of the culture of the lifeworld comprising:
(4a) normative systems of cultures, customs including the recognized ethical
standards, the law, and the systems of political power, and
(4b) worldviews belonging to higher understanding;
(5) the level of individual or collective psychological conditions of human actions.
Theories of hierarchically ordered types of real conditions are of significance for
the methodology of historical research and as such are of epistemological interest,
but beyond that also of methodological significance for the human sciences in
general, i.e., also for psychology and the social sciences. Not very much has been
said about their epistemological status and their significance for the epistemological
problem of historical explanations. Such explanations refer, as already mentioned,
to events or acts as singular historical facts that are causal factors or circumstantial
factors in a causal relation. The logical structure of a causal connection between
a cause together with circumstantial factors or “initial conditions” is usually
interpreted as a singular conditional that can be derived in a modus ponens from
a generalized conditional.
It is, therefore, impossible to understand the foundations between ideal types
of real conditions in the hierarchy of these ideal types of real causal conditions.

21
The natural environment was the same and agricultural grain production existed long before
windmills were invented in the Middle Ages.
22
Cf. Sect. 2.2 for the background of the following considerations, and on ideal objects in the
systematic and historical human sciences in general, see Sect. 10.4.
6.3 The Typology of Real Conditions and Its Significance for the Methodology. . . 143

However, it has been shown above that replicative conditionals can also be of
interest in historical explanations, but such singular replicative conditionals are
again justifiable only with the aid of logical derivations from generalized replicative
conditionals. The universality of the generalized conditionals is for implicative
and replicative conditionals an empirical universality. It is, therefore, impossible to
understand the foundations between ideal types of real conditions in the hierarchy
of these ideal types as real causal conditions. Thus the problem is how both aspects
can be brought together in methodological strategies of causal explanations in the
historical research.
To determine the necessary circumstantial factors in historical explanations is
one of the most difficult tasks for the reconstruction of sound historical explanations.
The hierarchy of the typology of real conditions can be used as a system of heuristic
methodical rules that is able to guide the search for relevant circumstantial factors
as necessary factors in historical causal explanations. The first methodical rule is to
look for circumstantial factors belonging to the next lower levels in the hierarchy
of the types of real conditions: certain real conditions in the natural environment
are necessary factors for the inventions of new technologies as events that cause
changes on the technological level. Historical reports about the act of the invention
of a technology have to provide the additional sufficient causal factor that is required
for a sound historical explanation of the emergence of a new technology. The
availability of certain technologies is in turn a necessary circumstantial factor for the
development of certain economic structures. Whether or not they will be developed
depends again on certain actions or interactions of, e.g., the merchants and bankers
in a certain period of the history of the economy.
The system of the typology of real conditions is, as mentioned, relevant for all
historical and systematic human sciences. Two short remarks about the specific
characteristics and the differences in the application of the typology of real
conditions in historical explanations in psychology and in the social sciences are
necessary. More will be said in Part IV.
The collective or individual real psychological conditions belonging to level (5)
are the immediate real conditions of human actions. Droysen mentions passions,
motives, and drives as real conditions, but he also emphasizes the difficulties of
convincing reconstructions and interpretation of such conditions.23 The problem is
that historical research has no immediate access to the psychological circumstantial
and causal conditions for actions of individuals or groups. The references that can
be found in biographical data or in biographies and autobiographies24 usually refer
to the social and cultural environment of the past lifeworld, and psychological
observations in such sources belong to the everyday psychology of the authors
of the biographies. References to circumstantial conditions belonging to (3) and
(4), the social environment of the actors, can be of interest for interpretations of

23
Droysen 1977, 188f.
24
This happens only in cultures in which the individual as such is of interest and individuality is a
generally recognized value.
144 6 Causal Explanations in History

the self-understanding and psychological motives of actors. There is, however, no

immediate access to the psyche of authors and actors in the sources.
Considering the arguments of Droysen, a well-known historian and methodol-
ogist of historical research in the nineteenth century, it is somewhat surprising to
discover that according to the epistemological interpretation of analytic philosophy
in the twentieth century, historical explanations have to borrow their presupposed
psychological generalized conditionals from everyday psychological experience.
Generalized psychological conditionals of everyday experience are undoubtedly
essential for causal explanations of the actions of contemporaries in the present
lifeworld. Such psychological explanations are, however, hopelessly contaminated
by present economic, legal, or political conditions belonging to levels (3) and
(4), and, last but not least, the framework of the dominating worldviews in the
present lifeworld. The assumption that such conditions can be presupposed in
historical explanations of human actions in a more distant past violates the first
methodological principle of the historical human sciences, and especially of the
historical reconstruction of the reality in past foreign lifeworlds. Historical critique
is able to reject such violations in historical explanations.
What is left is the assumption that psychology is able to discover generalized
conditionals representing real conditions of type (5) that can be applied in explana-
tions of human actions in general. A solution for difficulties of the relation between
psychology as a natural and a human science will be offered in Part IV. Several
attempts have been made in the first half of the last century to use psychoanalytic
theories in explanations of historical facts belonging to general social history as
well as to the general behavior and specific actions of famous individuals of the
past. That historical critique is able to reject such explanations by proving that the
explained historical facts cannot be justified as historical facts is not the main point.
The main point is that the status of psychoanalysis as a science – and science was
understood here as a natural science – was challenged in the analytic theory of
science. In order to save psychoanalysis as a tool for interpretations of art works and
in historical explanations of actions of individuals and groups, others tried to defend
psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic of the latent but that implies that psychoanalysis
belongs to the human sciences.25
The typology of real conditions is first of all of basic methodological significance
for research in the social sciences in the present lifeworld and its temporal horizons.
The empirical basis for social research is immediate observation of contemporaries
and their life expressions in the present. Their fixed life expressions in the immediate
past temporal horizon of the actual present can also be understood and, if necessary,
methodologically interpreted, in the cultural context of the present lifeworld. The
first task of historical research is, on the contrary, the reconstruction of the past
reality of a more or less foreign lifeworld and its own temporal and cultural
context. Historical research presupposes the givenness and interpretation of fixed
life expressions belonging to the past lifeworld. Such fixed life expressions are

25
Ricoeur 1970.
6.4 Historical Critique and the Falsification of Historical Explanations 145

the facts for the historian, and the reconstructed facts of a past lifeworld are the
historical facts. The task of historical explanations, and with it the methodical
application of the typology of real conditions, is, hence, only the last step in the
methodology of historical research. Historical facts that are of significance for
the temporal context of the past lifeworld need historical explanations. Historical
explanations always imply a context of reconstructed and interpreted circumstantial
conditions.

6.4 Historical Critique and the Falsification of Historical

Explanations

History is only about facts, and has nothing to say about the generalized condi-
tionals that are presupposed in historical explanations. This thesis is an immediate
consequence of the analytic logical and epistemological analysis of historical
explanations. Seen from the viewpoint of modern history, it has some puzzling
implications. In speaking of history one should distinguish between historiography,
historical research, and historical critique. The analytic thesis seems to have some
plausibility for historiographies. However, for history as a science, historiographies
are nothing other than narrative reports of the results of historical research and
historical critique. The thesis that historical research and then historical critique has
nothing to say about the truth or falsity of the application of generalized conditionals
in historical explanations to certain historical facts and also nothing about the truth
and falsity of genuine historical conditionals, is at the very least awkward. It is
awkward because the thesis implies that pre-scientific or scientific experience in
the present and nothing else is the source of the material for the discovery of the
generalized conditionals and the epistemological judgments about their truth or
probability. But according to the first principle of the methodology of the historical
human sciences, the only status that judgments and opinions taken from the context
of the present lifeworld can have in the context of foreign cultural lifeworlds and of
past foreign cultural lifeworlds is the status of pre-judgments.
The root problem of the analytic model is the tacit assumption that historical
facts reported in historiographies have the same epistemological status as facts
given in actual present experiences. Facts for everyday experience and for the
observations and experiments of the natural sciences are given in present sensory
experiences, and then in memories and expectations belonging to the immediate
temporal horizons of the actual present. The historical facts of historiographies are,
on the contrary, facts that have been given in a past experience of a lifeworld that
is more or less foreign to the actual present. The task of historical research is the
reconstruction of a past reality and of the historical facts belonging to this past
foreign reality. The material for the reconstructions of historical research are the
historical sources, texts and traces, the fixed life expressions created in the past and
given as facts for the historian in the present lifeworld.
146 6 Causal Explanations in History

Historical research and historical critique are inseparable. The first level of
historical critique is the critique of the reliability of the texts and traces that are
given in the present as facts for the historian. The second level of historical critique
is the critique of the reconstructive interpretation of the historical facts of a past
reality and its historical development. The question of historical critique on the
second level is whether the assumption of certain historical facts in the pre-given
reconstructions of historical facts can be falsified. The assumption that certain
historical facts are indeed facts of the past reality can be falsified with the aid of
the discovery of mistakes in presupposed interpretations of already given facts for
historical research or the discovery of new sources and traces as facts for historical
research. But the business of historical critique is not only destructive; it clears the
ground for the re-evaluation of presently available material and for the discovery
of new material for the historian. Further historical research is then able to develop
improved interpretative reconstructions of the past reality and its historical facts.
Finally it should be kept in mind that the relevant causes, the relevant effects,
and last but not least, the circumstantial conditions of historical explanations are
historical facts, and not facts given in the actual present. It should also be kept
in mind that the relevant historical facts in historical explanations are events that
triggered serious changes in the historical development of a past reality, and that
such events belong in the overwhelming majority of cases either to the natural
environment of a past reality or to significant actions and interactions of individuals
or groups of individuals with or without the participation of the “masses,” more
precisely, of significant parts of a whole population in a past reality.
After this recapitulation, it is now possible to distinguish two different intentions
in the basic question whether and how historical critique is able to falsify historical
explanations. We have (1) the question, whether historical critique is able to
falsify the application of the generalized conditionals regardless of whether they
are probable generalized conditionals justified by everyday present experience,
generalized conditionals borrowed from the natural sciences, or genuine historical
temporally restricted generalized conditionals.
An answer to this question is straightforward and simple. If historical critique
is able to falsify one of the historical facts underlying a historical explanation as
the cause, the other circumstantial conditions, or the conditioned effects, then the
application of the presupposed generalized conditional is falsified, and with it the
historical explanation.
1. (2) The second question is whether historical critique is able to falsify the pre-
supposed generalized conditionals of historical explanations as valid generalized
conditionals. Two cases can be distinguished:
(2.a) The answer to the first case is simple. Historical critique is not able
to reject the presupposed generalized conditionals if they belong to the
following levels of real conditions: already discussed in Sect. 6.3 level (1),
the first aspect of level (2) given in present everyday experience or in the
methodologically guided experience of the natural sciences in the present;
and level (5) if psychology is able to justify them.
6.4 Historical Critique and the Falsification of Historical Explanations 147

(2.b) Historical critique is able to falsify temporally restricted and therefore

genuine generalized conditionals. An answer has to distinguish:
(2.b.i) restricted generalized conditionals belonging to the levels of real
conditions of the second aspect of level (2) and levels (3) and (4);
(2.b.ii) universally generalized conditionals and restricted generalized
conditionals belonging to level (5).
Following the analytic model generalized conditionals used in historical expla-
nations of type (2.b.i) could be understood prima facie either as borrowed probable
generalized conditionals taken from present everyday social experience of the
present social lifeworld, or as methodologically justified conditionals from the
present state of the art in the social sciences. But this analogy to type (1) is limited.
The universal concepts used in the generalized conditionals of the social sciences are
already nothing more than carefully defined idealizations of concepts that have been
previously used for the everyday understanding of interactions of consociates in the
present lifeworld. A further crucial possibility of interactions in the present social
lifeworld is the encounter with contemporaries belonging to present foreign cultural
lifeworlds. Expectations guided by the experience of interactions with consociates
in one’s own social lifeworld are often brutally disappointed in such encounters,
and this means that the generalized conditionals supporting such expectations are
falsified.
The experience of such disappointments in the present is the justification of
the first principle guiding ethnological and ethno-sociological research. According
to this principle, all expectations with a background in probable or more or less
justified abstract generalized conditionals of the social sciences ought to be carefully
bracketed until the social structure of the foreign cultural lifeworld is deciphered by
ethnological field research.
The encounter with foreign cultures in the early phase of science and philological
research in and after the age of the Renaissance and Reformation was at least
an additional motivating factor for the development of the early versions of the
first methodological principle of the historical human sciences. According to this
principle, immediate applications or rejections of the literature, the arts, the customs
and laws, and the worldviews of past foreign cultures given as facts for the historian
in the present have to be bracketed as well. The first task of historical research (and
the first level of historical critique) is the reconstruction of the reality of a past real
lifeworld and the events, historical facts, determining its historical development.
Causal explanations can already be found in the written sources given as facts for
the historian, and the first task of historical critique is to evaluate the sources and to
discover misleading information, i.e., to falsify the information given in the original
sources.
The consequence is that causal explanations referring to real conditions in the
reports of historiographies that belong to case (2.b.i) presuppose restricted genuine
historical generalized conditionals and that the falsification of such conditionals
is the business of the second level of historical research. Since the limits of the
applicability of such generalized conditionals are historical facts according to (1) all
148 6 Causal Explanations in History

applications outside the limits can be falsified. The main point is, however, that
causal explanations referring to real conditions, i.e., to the structure of technological,
economic, customary and legal conditions, and finally to the worldviews of a past
reality, can be reconstructed only via the interpretations of sources and traces in
historical research, and therefore only historical critique is able to falsify such
reconstructions.
(2.b.ii) The distinction between psychology as a natural science and understand-
ing psychology as a systematic human science and the problems connected with it
has already been mentioned. According to (1) and (2.a) applications of generalized
conditionals borrowed from psychology as a natural science can be falsified, but
the generalized conditionals themselves cannot be falsified by historical critique.
The problems left are the generalized conditionals belonging to the generalized
conditionals of present everyday psychological experience and the generalized
conditionals of understanding psychology. They will be considered in Sect. 10.1.
Many historical causal explanations of type (2.b.ii) presuppose generalized
conditionals belonging to everyday psychological experiences. Such explanations,
though prima facie plausible, originally guide the expectations in the present
lifeworld. Usually they implicitly refer to the real conditions belonging to the second
aspect of level (2) and levels (3) and (4). Because they are co-determined by such
implications, they can be falsified together with them according to (2.b.ii). Under-
standing psychology can justify generalized conditionals about human sociability
and aggressiveness, sexuality, creativity, etc., on a high level of universality. Such
conditionals are not relevant for historical causal explanations because they say
something about the general human condition and nothing about the real conditions
determining causal explanations for a certain historical situation. They are relevant
only together with the modifying real conditions of the specific historical conditions
that belonging to levels (2), (3), and (4). But such generalized conditionals can again
be falsified because of their specifying implications belonging to case (2.b.ii).
An additional difficulty for psychological causal explanations of historical facts
is that a diagnosis, i.e., the theoretical explanation for mental diseases of a patient,
presupposes a precise description of the presently given symptoms as facts for the
psychologist. A significant part of these facts have to be found in methodically
guided interviews. It is, however, impossible to apply this method for securing
relevant facts in psychological historical explanations in a foreign past reality. The
material for such psychological explanations has to be reconstructed by historical
research. But the available historical sources for the reconstructions are infested
with the everyday psychological explanations used in the foreign past reality in
question. Anything that has been discovered this way is once again an object for
the possible falsifications of historical critique.
What is left is to illustrate what has been said with an example.26 According
to F. W. Maitland, Elizabeth I was the first sovereign who “etceterated” the full
title of her father, Henry VIII, proclaiming him as King of England, defender of

26
The references to Maitland and Pollard are taken from Nagel 1961, 552ff.
6.4 Historical Critique and the Falsification of Historical Explanations 149

the faith and after that “Head on Earth of the Church of England called Anglicana
Ecclesia,” thus hiding her claim to be the head of the Anglican Church. Maitland
mentions several plausible historical reasons explaining why Elizabeth I did that.
Nagel constructed a tacitly presupposed generalized implicative psychological
conditional behind them, referring to “(a) public statements men are expected
to issue concerning their ostensible commitment to some policy at a time when
definitive commitment is hazardous, and (b) the use of ambiguous language in such
statements for the sake of avoiding commitment.”
This conditional is, however, a sociological and only in the second place a
psychological generalized conditional. Hence it is possible to find restricting speci-
fications that are relevant for historical research and critique. The first restriction is
that a feudal king, and even the emperor at this time, would use ambiguous language
for a policy that violated the privileges of the pope and the powerful Spaniards as
defenders of privileges of the pope.
Nagel mentions that in a footnote (!), after Maitland made the point above
that A. F. Pollard checked the available sources again and was able to show that
Mary, the older sister of Elizabeth I, had etceterated her title before Elizabeth.
According to Nagel, this is not relevant for the analysis of the structure of historical
explanations because history is only about facts. But with Pollard’s discovery, all the
reasons about generalized conditionals and the specifying circumstantial conditions
mentioned above are not applicable according to (a), and in this sense are falsified
for Elizabeth I. They are also not applicable to the new problem why Mary used the
etc., because as a Catholic she had no reason to fear the pope.
Seen from the viewpoint of historical research Nagel’s approach is awkward. It
is true, that the logical and epistemological analysis of the historical explanations
of a historical fact reported in a certain historiography can only presuppose just
the historical facts that are mentioned in this historiography. The crucial point
is, however, that Pollard’s historical research had falsified Maitland’s assumption,
and with it the application of Nagel’s generalized conditionals in the historical
explanation of the use of “etc.” by Elisabeth I and Mary.
The example can also be used to illustrate the problems of the falsification of
restricted generalized conditionals and circumstantial conditions. The problem is
why both – to say nothing about their advisors – used the “etc.” to abbreviate their
title thus hiding or denying or saving the claim of their father to be the head of the
Anglican Church. That Mary as a Catholic had no reasons to fear the pope and that
Elizabeth I, on the contrary, had a good reason because she favored the independence
of the Anglican Church from the pope are factors belonging to the less relevant
circumstantial conditions. But there are two conditions that can be acknowledged as
relevant causal condition:
(1) According to the law of the church recognized by the Catholic, the Anglican,
and the Protestant churches at the time, a woman cannot be a priest, let alone
the head of a church. The legal question was already settled in the High Middle
Ages. The emperor, let alone a monarch, had no say in the administration of the
church and the election of high-ranking church officials.
150 6 Causal Explanations in History

(2) According to the customs and the law of the time a feudal sovereign had the duty
to save all her/his legal titles for her/his followers in the dynasty because every
title implied legal rights in economic revenues, political power, and military
power.
These real conditions belong to levels (3) and (4). They are restricted genuine
historical generalized conditionals open for the possible falsifications of historical
critique. What can be added is that Mary would have preferred to scratch the claim
of Henry VIII and that Elizabeth I wanted to save it. But this belongs to the specific
real psychological conditions of their personal inclinations, i.e., to the less relevant
historical circumstances accompanying their actions.

6.5 Interpretation, Application, and Historical Reality:

Summary and Transition

Previous discussions of the problem of interpretation and application and the

first canon of hermeneutics in the wake of Gadamer’s Truth and Method usually
neglected the difference between the application of this canon in philology taken
for itself as a discipline and its application in philological-historical research.27 The
philological interpretation of a text in the medium of its context of texts separates
the context of the text and the context of the interpreter, of interpretation and
possible application or rejection. But according to Gadamer all interpretations on
this level immediately invite the application28 of the interpreted text in the context
of the interpreter.29 It is a mistake to assume that Gadamer rejected the necessity
of methodically guided interpretation of texts as a presupposition for a meaningful
application of the interpreted text in the present of the interpreter.30 He would not
deny that the application of the law presupposes an independent interpretation of
a law before applying the law to a present case. Gadamer rejected, however, an
explication of interpretation and application in terms of history and the methodology
of historical research.31

27
Cf. e.g., Dostal 2008; Seebohm 2008; Grünewald 2009, 49, 57–60.
28
Following Sect. 3.4 above one has to add – contrary to Gadamer – “or rejection.”
29
Examples are the interpretation and application of the law, but also the interpretation of a play
and applying the interpretation in bringing into the stage without using the text as a pre-text for
deliberate and sometimes rather unconvincing ideas of the stage director, etc.
30
Cf. Gadamer 1975 in a review of Seebohm 1972. The problem is that Gadamer’s critique of
methods in Gadamer 1965 criticizes methodologies of philological research as Cartesian methods
but neither the methodologies of the human sciences in general nor those of the natural sciences
are Cartesian methods more geometrico. They are both empirical, not mathematical sciences.
31
Gadamer 1965, part II, section II, 2.c, 318 ff. insists on the distinction between philological
hermeneutics of texts and historics as methodology for the historian.
6.5 Interpretation, Application, and Historical Reality: Summary and Transition 151

The methodological abstraction of the first canon of hermeneutics for philology

separates, as mentioned at the end of Sect. 5.3, the context of a text and the context
of the interpreter. The temporality of the process of interpreting the text is the real
intersubjective temporality of the interpreter. The temporality of a text, and of the
texts in the context of the past and present horizon of the text is a quasi-temporality.
It can be recognized as the real temporality of a past present if and only if it is
recognized that a text, like all other fixed life expressions, has a known or unknown
author. The quasi-temporality of the text is a derived shadow of the real temporality
of the past present of the author(s). The restricted application of the first canon
to the pure philological hermeneutics of texts necessarily implies the banishment
of the author. The rehabilitation of the author presupposes the transition to the
philological-historical method.
The separation of the two horizons required by the first canon is quasi-temporal.
The text represents a past present with its temporal horizons, but nothing is said
about the temporal location of this present in the past of the interpreter. Seen from
the viewpoint of the temporal horizons of the text, the place of the interpreter is
somewhere at the end of the “efficient history,” the efficient future of the text, the
quasi-temporal future horizon of texts that refer to the text. The text implicitly refers
to an author in an otherwise undetermined past. But this implied reference is not of
interest; it remains empty and in brackets for the method of pure text interpretation.
The “banishment of the author” is, hence, justified for pure text interpretation, for
the philological hermeneutics of the philologists of Classical Antiquity, and for the
humanists and their doctrine of methods for philology as a discipline. This implies
that all interpretations of philological hermeneutics invite the additional application
or rejection of the truth32 of the text in a given interpretation in the present of an
interpreter.33
Texts are given for philological-historical interpretations as texts of an author,
and the biography of the author along with the historical reconstruction of the
temporal development of a past present are relevant as well. The reconstruction
of a past reality presupposes, on the one hand, the philological and archaeological
interpretation of fixed life expressions. The fixed life expressions are, on the other
hand, fixed life expressions that have been created in the context of the reconstructed
past present, and this perspective is, in turn, of relevance for the interpretation
of the fixed life expressions. Following the language game of the hermeneutical
circle, it can be said that this is the philological-historical “circle” of philological
interpretation and historical reconstruction. Of real methodological significance
is, however, that the residuum of the methodological abstraction implied in the

32
The difference between Gadamer’s analysis of the relation between tradition and application and
the analysis given in Sect. 3.4 above is that the possible applications of the parts or of the whole of
a tradition always has as their correlate possible rejections of this part or even the whole tradition.
33
Gadamer 1965, esp. part II, section II, 2, a. It has to be added that a canon demanding the
actualizing of the text was already a recognized methodical rule of the old humanistic philological
doctrine of methods, cf. Sect. 5.2 above on the canons of hermeneutics.
152 6 Causal Explanations in History

first canon in its philological-historical version is now recognized as a foreign

real past present separated by a real temporal distance from the present of the
historical reconstructive interpretation of the past present. The historian-interpreter
is not interested in the truth or falsity of the message of the text for her/his own
present; instead she/he is interested in the meaning and significance of the fixed life
expression in a temporal context that has the formal structure of a real past present,
a present for and in the lived experience of more or less foreign predecessors.
The application of the first canon in the methodology of the historical human
sciences implies, as mentioned, a methodological abstraction separating the context
of the historian from the projection of the facts for the historian, i.e., the fixed
life expressions, into a past more or less foreign cultural context. The attitude of
historical research is the attitude of a “disinterested observation.” This means in
this case that the meaning and significance of the fixed life expressions is given as
meaning and significance for Others at a temporal distance. There is no immediate
need to apply or to reject them in the own context of one’s own tradition in the
present. The attitude of disinterested observation in historical research is in this
sense also value-free.
The application of the first canon of hermeneutics in philological interpretations
of a text has to refer to a context of texts. The application of the first canon of
hermeneutics in historical reconstructions and interpretations of a past reality and
its temporal development refers to a reconstructed context of historical facts. The
interpreter of a text has to distinguish between
texts in the future horizon, the efficient “history” (more precisely the context of texts
that have been influenced by the text) and
texts in the past horizon of the text to which the text refers, i.e., texts in the context
of texts that belong to the conditions of the generation of the text.
An assumed interpretation of the text is falsified if it is incompatible with the
context of texts in the past horizon of the text. The situation is different for the
philological-historical approach. What is of interest in this case is not only the text
in its context of texts, but also the biography of the author of the text in the context
of the author’s situation within the context of a past real lifeworld and its historical
development. It is of interest for the philological-historical approach because it can
be of additional significance for the interpretation of the text.
History is interested in the reconstruction of a past lifeworld and its temporal
development, and beyond that, in the place of this lifeworld in the context other
cultural lifeworlds that follow it temporally or are geographically foreign to it.
History presupposes, hence, a general formal structure of historical temporality, but
also of historical space determining the location of the past present and the past
location of a past lifeworld. The materials of the reconstruction of a past reality
are already philologically and/or archaeologically interpreted fixed life expressions
of authors living in a foreign past. The reconstruction of the past reality offers
in addition the material for the philological-historical interpretation of the life
expressions of authors living in a foreign past that can be located, within a formal
spatial and temporal structure in a place that is foreign to the present and the place of
6.5 Interpretation, Application, and Historical Reality: Summary and Transition 153

the historian. This formal structure determines the place of the interpreting historian
and her/his context and the place of the reconstructed foreign past lifeworld and the
real distance between them. The structure separates and determines the distance
between the historical and the philological-historical interpretation of fixed life
expressions and their cultural context, and in perhaps the biographical context of
their authors as well.
The assumption of this structure is a necessary implication of the methodology
of the historical human sciences, of the epistemological justification for Schleierma-
cher’s version of the first canon of hermeneutics, and of Dilthey’s application of this
canon to the historical human sciences in general: the standard of an interpretation is
the context of the author and the contemporary audience of the author. However, the
explication given for the universalized version of the first canon as the principle
of the methodology (and the methodological abstraction) that is constitutive for
the recognition of the historical human studies as empirical sciences raises further
epistemological question. The methodologically determined attitude of historical
research is obviously not possible in all types of concrete lifeworlds. It requires
specific generative foundations in a specific lifeworld, and these foundations must
in turn have their foundation in structures of the lifeworld in general.
History as a science has to locate the past realities within a common formal
temporal and spatial framework in which they are all given together in a universal
context. The temporal-spatial framework of concrete archaic and in general pre-
scientific cultural lifeworlds is bound to their system of higher and elementary
understanding. Encounters with other cultural lifeworlds are understood within this
framework.34 Material structures like the regular movement of celestial bodies
and the geographical distribution of oceans, continents, mountains, and rivers
occur as given in relative intersubjectivity in these cultures in different, partially
incompatible ethnocentric systems of elementary and higher understanding.
The application of the first canon as a methodological principle in philological-
historical research presupposes as one of its foundations a universal Galilean
framework of time-space coordinates as the medium for the spatial and temporal
localizations of all texts and events including all other concrete cultural lifeworlds in
the past horizon of historians and interpreters. The givenness of a culturally neutral
system of time-space coordinates has its foundation in the structure of temporality
and spatiality in the lifeworld in general.
The objects given in the residuum of the methodological abstraction of the
historical human sciences can only be given in a cultural lifeworld that is able
to localize both itself and foreign cultural lifeworlds in the Galilean spatial and
temporal framework just characterized. Systems of higher understanding in pre-
scientific lifeworlds create mythological and religious interpretations that are valid

34
Perfect prototypes of such self-centered traditions are the chronicles of Byzantine monks, e.g.,
Malalas or Georgios Hamartolos. History is in this case (but also in derived or similar types) always
a universal history of religio-centered salvation. The “pagans” have no history. Their history is a
meaningless sequence of events, sometimes punished by God, sometimes not.
154 6 Causal Explanations in History

only in the perspective of their own cultural context. They are in this sense
ethnocentric, and seen from the outside, only of relative intersubjective validity.
The first-order higher understanding in a lifeworld with sciences is at least
partially also governed by philosophical and scientific theories, and thus implies a
Galilean framework in the sense characterized above. This foundation of the spatial
and temporal structure of historical reality for historical research is in addition
the foundation for possible applications of causal laws borrowed from the natural
sciences in historical explanations of changes in the natural environment of a past
cultural lifeworld. The epistemology and methodology of historical research on the
level of history as a science is, therefore, also able to take into account how such
“real causes” and “real conditions” have been understood in pre-scientific lifeworlds
and then in a lifeworld with sciences.
What has to be kept in mind for the second-order interpretation of the first-
order understanding of the meaning of “cause” and “fact” in pre-scientific higher
understanding used in old chronicles and histories is that this old meaning can
still be alive in the background of some contexts, though more or less covered by
theoretical philosophical and scientific interpretations of “cause” and “fact.” The old
Latin meaning of causa and factum already mentioned in Sect. 3.3 can be used as a
guiding thread back to the original pre-scientific meaning. The meaning of factum
implies that a fact is caused by the action of somebody who was the causa of the
factum, i.e., the one who has done it and is, therefore, responsible for the “factum”
and in this sense guilty. What was done is worthwhile to be reported in historiae if
it is of religious, political, legal, or technological significance.
The law and its applications in jurisprudence have been used in reflections
about “Truth and Method”35 as a model for the inseparability of interpretation
and application and, as a consequence, for downgrading the historical aspect in
the task of the interpretation of the texts and monuments of the tradition. What is
overlooked, and can be used for a possible rehabilitation of the historical aspect in
the philological-historical method, is that an acceptable application of the law to a
case requires thorough investigations about what happened in the past horizon of the
actual present. To look at some aspects of the logical and epistemological structures
of understanding “causes,” “facts,” and “circumstantial conditions” in legal contexts
is, therefore, also useful for the analysis of historical reconstructions of “what really
happened” in a more distant past.
Seen from a logical point of view, laws have the character of generalized
normative conditionals. Presupposed is a generalized norm: “All actors ought not
/ ought to do X (under certain circumstances Y).” followed by a generalized
normative conditional defining the sanction: For all actors: “if/only if they do/do
not X (under certain circumstances Y) they ought to receive the punishment Z.” The
final task for a court of law is the application of the law, a generalized conditional, to
a particular case.36 Except for the knowledge of the law, the main work that has to be

35
Gadamer 1965, part II, section II, 2.c.
36
A more detailed account of the problems of law and jurisprudence will be given in Sect. 10.6.
6.5 Interpretation, Application, and Historical Reality: Summary and Transition 155

done for this purpose is to determine the facts and provide causal explanations of the
particular case. The question “what is the case” cannot be answered by immediate
observations based on intersensory experience in court. The understanding of the
facts is governed by the already pre-given definition of the facts in the law. The main
problem is that the facts in question happened in the past phase of the actual present
of the investigations. The fact and its circumstances are, hence, reconstructions,
and the materials for the reconstruction are reports from witnesses, circumstantial
evidence, and documents. It is, furthermore, required for passing sentence that the
reconstruction of the facts and the reasons for the application of a law to the facts
are on the records,37 i.e., available in a written text, because the reconstruction of
the fact and the verdict ought to be available for future review.
The first task of investigations in a court of law is to find out whose action
caused the fact. The second task is to determine the circumstantial conditions
under which the action took place. Several types of circumstances that may be of
interest in different cases of actions can be distinguished. There are circumstances
belonging to the natural environment of the action, there are technological and
economic circumstances; and finally there is the psychological conditions, including
the motives of the actor(s). The typology of real conditions that has been considered
above is in this respect also of significance for such investigations. The goal of
such investigations is the reconstruction of what happened in the immediate past
horizon of the present. Pre-given for the reconstruction are the spatial and temporal
structures and together with them the structures of causal relations, including causal
relations that have been discovered by the natural sciences in a lifeworld with natural
sciences.
The relevant facts for the reconstruction in a court of law are facts in the
past horizon of the present lifeworld. Apart from circumstantial evidence and
documents, the subjective memories of witnesses, of the accused, and of the other
persons involved are still available for the investigation as immediate and fixed life
expressions in the hearings of a court of law. The materials for the reconstruction
and the reconstruction itself belong together and are linked with each other in the
unity of the past and future horizons in the actual present intersubjective time
phase of lived experience. In most cases it is neither necessary nor possible for
secondary understanding of these life expressions to apply the methodological rules
of philological interpretations. Historical reconstructions of a real lifeworld in a
distant past have to presuppose the same formal structure. There are, however,
essential differences in the structure of the empirical basis. The available materials
for the reconstructions of historical research, the fixed life expressions (written
sources and archaeological traces), are not immediately linked with the present
lifeworld of the historian. There is no chance to meet the actors, or to ask them or
the witnesses, etc., in the present. The fixed life expressions as facts that are given
in the present for the historian and the reconstruction of the historical facts and

37
Quod non est in actis non est in mundo: “What is not on the record is not in the world” is a
well-known principle of Roman law.
156 6 Causal Explanations in History

their interpretation are separated. The facts for the historian are given in the actual
present and its immediate past and future horizon for historical research. In contrast,
the reconstructed historical facts belong to a distant past present and its past and
future horizon, and it is this distance that admits and requires the application of the
modified first canon of hermeneutics in historical research.
Two further epistemological problems will surface in re-considerations of this
summary of the results of the preceding sections. The first is that a temporal phase
in a distant past (and with it the possible causal explanations of what happened in
this phase) is indefinitely open in direction of the past horizon of this phase. This
implies that historical research can go back in the direction of this past, proceeding
from the sequence of temporal phases of cultures with a literary tradition to pre-
historical cultures without a literary tradition. Research in this direction cannot be
restricted to archaeological interpretation of artifacts and monuments. It will have
to use increasing amounts of traces that belong to the material of paleontology. The
history of humankind, and with it of the ontological region of the human or cultural
sciences, appears in this dimension as an extension of the history of nature.
This foundation of the spatial and temporal structure of historical reality for
historical research is in addition the presupposition of possible applications of
generalized causal conditionals that have been borrowed from the natural sciences in
historical explanations of changes in the natural environment of a past cultural life-
world. Such explanations are not restricted to history in the narrower sense. They can
be applied, and frequently have been applied in paleographical research preparing
philological-historical interpretation of texts and in archaeology, especially in pre-
historical archaeology. They are of significance for the transition from pre-scientific
techniques in elementary understanding to the steady growth of first mathematical
and mechanical and then scientific technologies in the narrower sense since the
seventeenth century. It is, hence, impossible to discuss epistemological questions
of the human sciences in splendid isolation without considering the fields in which
the human and the natural sciences overlap. A strict separation of the sciences of
“understanding” and the sciences of “explanation” does not hold water. Thus after
the phenomenological reflections on the epistemology of the natural sciences in Part
III, it will be necessary to return to the problem of the relation between history as a
science and the natural sciences in Part IV, Sect. 9.1.
A past present also has a past future horizon and this horizon is beset with a
sequence of events that end in temporal phases belonging to contemporary history.
The distance between historical facts and facts for the historian, between the past
present and the actual present, shrinks in the steady transition from the future
horizon of the past present to the past horizon of the actual present. What shrinks
together with the distance is the applicability of the first canon, and with it the
abstractive reduction that warrants the status of the historian as a disinterested
observer. The advantage is that the material basis of contemporary history is
precisely the basis that is, as shown above, the basis also for the investigation of
“what was the case” in a court of law. This indicates that this material basis also
offers the material for the systematic human sciences insofar as they are interested
in the present, and even in predictions referring to the future horizon of the present.
6.5 Interpretation, Application, and Historical Reality: Summary and Transition 157

Research in the natural sciences also has the material basis of its observations
in the present and is also interested in predictions, but this also causes problems
for the analysis of the relation between the natural sciences and the systematic
human sciences. An indicator is, on the one hand, that the methodology of empirical
psychology shares most of the structures of research in the life sciences. The social
sciences presuppose, on the other hand, the results of historical research, especially
of social, economic, legal, and political history. These problems will be considered
in Chap. 10.
 Part III
The Methodology of the Natural Sciences
Chapter 7
The Empirical Basis and the Thematic
Attitude of the Natural Sciences

7.1 Basic Problems of the Epistemology

of the Natural Sciences

Positivism and later analytic philosophy governed the epistemology of the natural
sciences and the sciences in general in the nineteenth and the first half of the
twentieth century. The system of the natural sciences proposed by the positivists and
the analysts is straightforward. There are the hard sciences, i.e., physics (including
astronomy, and astrophysics), and chemistry, on the one hand, and, on the other
hand, the soft sciences: the life sciences, but also the social sciences and history
to the extent to which causal explanations can be applied to historical facts. The
positivistic research program expects that the historical and the social sciences can
be reduced to psychology, psychology to biology and physiology, physiology to
chemistry, and chemistry to physics. This reduction is the presupposition of the
ontological program of naturalism. The ideal epistemological paradigm providing
the norm for what can count as a science for the analytic approach is physics. The
analytic epistemology of science of the first half of the last century is normative,
and in a certain sense, a Neo-Kantianism without a transcendental subject. There
are no a priori forms of intuition and there is no subjective unity of transcendental
apperception, but the extensional interpretation of classical logic and formalized
mathematics are the normative “presuppositions of the possibility” for a possible
science.1 Logic by itself is transcendental.

1
Popper’s early Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie written 1930–1932 and pub-
lished 1979 by Hanssen was still written in the wake of Neo-Kantianism. Popper’s positive
evaluation but also his critique of the Vienna School shows the traces of the influence of Kant’s
Critique as well as Kant’s appraisal and critique of Hume, cf. Schäfer 1988, 35f.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 161

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_7
162 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

There has been no intellectual exchange, no bridge between the tradition of

analytic philosophy and the tradition of the so-called Continental philosophy, i.e.,
phenomenology, fundamental ontology, existential philosophy, and the defenders of
the human sciences in the wake of Dilthey in North America. Scientific technology
was anathema for most philosophers in the latter tradition and so was science and in
general das rechnende Denken (calculating thinking.) There has been an interest in a
phenomenological epistemology of the human sciences as sciences of the lifeworld.
However, apart from a few but significant exceptions that will be considered below,
there has been almost no interest in the epistemological problems of the natural
sciences. The first task for a phenomenological epistemology is, therefore, to
ascertain whether, where, and how reflective phenomenological descriptions can
be of significance for the problems of the epistemology of the natural sciences. A
selective and schematic sketch of the development of the epistemology of the natural
sciences can serve as a guideline.
The first principle of the epistemology of the natural sciences since Bacon was,
and to some extent still is, that the natural sciences are empirical sciences and
that the main task of the methodology of the natural sciences is the empirical
determination of the truth and falsity of hypotheses, i.e., universal conditional
judgments about causal relations. The final arbiter for questions about the truth or
falsity of such judgments is sensory experience.
Since Galileo and Descartes the second principle has been that the adequate
language for a true philosophy of nature is the language of mathematics. The method
of mathematics is the warrant of indubitable truth. Universal judgments of a true
philosophy of nature based on experiment and observation can be recognized as
universally true only if they are in addition derivable as theorems of mathematically
guided theories. More about this will be considered in Sect. 8.2.
According to J.S. Mill’s logic of induction and his descriptive analysis of the
methodology of experiments,2 hypotheses about causal laws can be falsified or
verified in experiments. The naïve claim that repeatable successful experiments can
count as a sufficient criterion of the truth, the final verification of the hypothesis
of a universal natural law, was, however, already challenged by Kant. Universal
judgments cannot be verified in the empirical natural sciences. They can only
be falsified.3 The verification of hypotheses in experiments means, hence, that
they have not been falsified thus far, are in this sense confirmed, corroborated up
until now, and remain fallible and able to be falsified by future experiments or
observations. Naïve falsificationalism can be characterized as a synthesis of Mill’s
epistemological account of the experiment and Kant’s methodological restriction on
the truth claims of affirmative universal empirical judgments. Naïve falsificationism
in this sense is an account of the methodology of confirming or rejecting universal

2
Mill 1977, Book III.
3
Kant KGS III, Critique of Pure Reason, B 819 in “II. Transcendental Doctrine of Methods.”
7.1 Basic Problems of the Epistemology of the Natural Sciences 163

statements about causal connections with the aid of the methods of experiment and
observation in the medium of the empirical basis of the natural sciences.4
Since physics is the normative paradigm in the positivistic approach the main
question is whether experimental research is able to falsify or to confirm not only
hypotheses, but also theories. Given theories written in mathematical language,
hypotheses can be derived as theorems of the theory. According to dogmatic
falsificationism,5 an empirical falsification of a derived hypothesis implies the
falsification of the theory with a simple application of modus tollens. Dogmatic
falsificationism can be challenged by conventionalism. Theories cannot be rejected
by one or some experimental counter examples. First there is always the possibility
that a more detailed account of the factors or initial conditions of an experimental
situation or an observation will be able to destroy the evidence of the falsifying
instance. Then there is the possibility of introducing auxiliary hypotheses that can
be used as plausible reasons for the rejection of the falsification of a hypothesis in
experiments. There are in addition other methodological criteria providing good
reasons for the defense of theories that have to be rejected according to the
standards of dogmatic falsificationism: the simplicity, the explanatory power, etc.
Answers to these objections of conventionalism and other objections can be given
by sophisticated methodological falsificationism.6
Further epistemological reflections indicate serious problems in the common
ground presupposed on both sides. What serves as the normative ideal of falsifi-
cationism and conventionalism are strict causal laws and this presupposes that the
language of the theories of the sciences admits and even requires the grammar of the
formal and formalized language of mathematics. A first difficulty is that there are
“theories” in the life sciences that are by no means written in mathematical letters,
e.g., Darwin’s theory of evolution. A second problem is that statistical causality
is predominant in the life sciences. Mathematical statistics is also of significance
for some theories in the hard sciences, but the epistemological significance of the
application of statistics in this context is different.7 A third problem is that, seen
from the viewpoint of the normative principle guiding the “textbook” history of the
sciences, the historical evolution of the sciences is a steady progress. The immediate
experience of the “revolutionary” transition from classical to post-classical physics

4
Cf. Lakatos 1976, 95f. Lakatos mentions no epistemologists who defended his “dogmatic falsifi-
cationism.” What has been called “naïve falsificationism” above he calls “naïve methodological
falsificationism” as opposed to “sophisticated methodological falsificationism,” cf. 103ff and
116ff.
5
See Popper 1968, esp. ch. IV. Other analysts have not challenged Popper’s analysis of experiments
in the sciences, cf., e.g., Quine 1996, I. 5, 12f.: and cf. also below on Quine’s analysis of
observation sentences and Popper’s basic statements.
6
The answer of the sophisticated methodological falsificationism to the conventionalism of Lakatos
also includes a sophisticated re-interpretation of Kuhn’s crises and revolutions in the sciences. The
paradigm is understood as a research program and such research programs have protective belts
against negative problem shifts. Cf. Lakatos et al. eds. 1976, 115ff; 135; 155.
7
On statistical mechanics and the special situation in quantum mechanics, cf. Sect. 8.4 below.
164 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

and from classical mathematics to post-classical formalism in the second half of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century teaches something else. The
history of science offers many examples of similar shifts in the research programs
of the sciences.
References to what scientists “really did” in the historical development of
science, and especially in the recent history of science, already surfaced in the
arguments of the conventionalists against the falsificationists and vice versa. Their
references to this or that concrete example of scientific research initiated a turn in the
development of the epistemology of the natural sciences. The history of science was
now considered to be the medium and the final arbiter for epistemological questions.
This turn is plagued by other difficulties. To characterize the basic historical changes
in the sciences as revolutions leading from one paradigm, one self-sufficient context
of understanding nature, to the next without admitting any rational continuity8 is
not acceptable. The metaphorical use of “revolution” in the context of the history
of science is already misleading. Political revolutions cannot be understood as
paradigm shifts.9 The main problem is, however, the thesis that scientific paradigms
dominating certain periods in the history of science are incompatible with later or
earlier paradigms. The necessary consequence is that the history of science ends in
the epistemological trap that threatens the historical sciences in general: historicism
and historical relativism.10
A paradigm is, presupposing the phenomenological analysis of the significance
of tradition for the structure of the lifeworld, a tradition of a literary meta-genre of
higher understanding functioning as a norm or authority demanding the continuing
application of the tradition. The phenomenological analysis of the structure of

8
Kuhn 1970.
9
They are revolutions in an old system of the distribution of political power prepared by long
periods of economic, political, and intellectual changes in a society. A politically dominated but
economically already dominating social class finally succeeds in a sudden and violent struggle for
being the dominating factor in the distribution of political power. This implies, however, that the
political revolution is precisely restricted to the political question of the distribution of power in a
state. Kuhn never referred to Kant’s Copernican revolution. The image behind Kant’s metaphor is
the image of the revolutions (original Latin meaning of revolutio) of the planets including sun and
moon around the earth. According to the Copernican revolution of these “revolutions” the planets,
including the earth, revolve around the sun. Kant’s metaphor connecting the Copernican problem of
the revolutions of the stars with the French political revolution called his philosophical revolution a
Copernican revolution emphasizing that his revolution, namely, the thesis that the a priori is not in
the things, but in the understanding of the things in the transcendental unity of apperception. This
really was a universal radical paradigm shift in epistemology. Kuhn’s revolutions in the sciences
are only modifications of pre-given patterns.
10
Kuhn 1976, mentions viewpoints that are able to soften the relativistic consequences of his
incommensurability thesis of paradigms. He mentions in his defense Quine’s problem of radical
translation, but this problem is a puzzle for a lingualistic understanding of the problem of
translation, i.e., a problem for the epistemology of the human and not of the natural sciences.
The real problem is that observation sentences are according to Quine always theory-laden, cf.
Quine 1996, I, 2–4. It is questionable whether Quine’s problem of radical translations can be used
to defend Kuhn’s incommensurability of paradigms. Cf. the discussion below.
7.1 Basic Problems of the Epistemology of the Natural Sciences 165

the generation of a tradition has also shown that tradition presupposes not only
the application, but also the rejection of aspects of the tradition. A paradigm as
a norm is a meaningful part of the generation of a tradition only because it is
possible to reject aspects of the paradigm. Rejections are in the most cases more
or less partial rejections connected with partial applications of the old tradition.
Almost complete radical rejections of a whole system of higher understanding that
can be understood as radical paradigm shifts are possible, but there are very few
real historical instances for such rejections and there are certainly no complete
rejections, in the history of modern science since the sixteenth century. A thorough
account of the relevant aspects of the historical process of the development of the
sciences and its significance for the epistemology of the natural sciences requires
further distinctions. Of significance for the present investigation is, however, first
of all that the phenomenological explication of the notion of “paradigm” given
above indicates that the recognition of the significance of the history of science
for the epistemology of the natural sciences implies the possibility of applying
phenomenological analyses in the epistemology of the natural sciences. This
indication needs further explication.
A history of science presupposes a methodologically guided philological-
historical interpretation of texts belonging to the literary meta-genre “scientific
literature.”11 An epistemology of the natural sciences that includes reflections on
the history of science presupposes, hence, the recognition of history as a science.
A philological-historical interpretation is in this case the secondary understanding
of the first-order understanding of nature in scientific texts. The next step is the
epistemological analysis of what the scientists have really done, of their activities in
their first-order understanding of nature. A method is a collection of rules guiding
goal-directed activities. Such a collection can be called a paradigm of certain
types of understanding. A paradigm in this sense is, however, too broad for the
purposes of the epistemology of the science. Paradigms in the broad sense can
be discovered in the history of painting, of music, and of agriculture, etc. The
task is, hence, to begin with the analysis of the specific properties of paradigms
in the sciences. Sciences claim to provide objectively valid and intersubjectively
acceptable systems of knowledge. Scientific paradigms are methodologies, and
methodologies are collections of methodical rules, together with the justification of
the claim that these methods can be recognized as warrants of the objective validity
of the theoretical understanding of a certain region of objects, the region of objects
of the science in question. A science can have different paradigms because, seen
from the historical point of view, there are significant modifications in the historical
development of the methodology of this science. The descriptive analysis of the
applied methodologies is the task of a historically guided epistemology.
The epistemological problems connected with the status of descriptions of
paradigms, research programs, program shifts, and other descriptive typologies

11
What follows is a brief recapitulation of the phenomenological analyses in Part I, Sects. 3.4
and 4.5.
166 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

in a historically guided epistemology of the natural sciences, and especially the

hard sciences, seem never to have been raised in the literature. The reader is left
with the impression that such typologies are empirical systems of concepts and
categories that presuppose empirically accessible reflections on historical and/or
psychological facts. Seen from the viewpoint of phenomenology, this impression
implies the epistemological relativism of psychologism and/or historicism. These
problems are, however, precisely the problems that can be solved with the aid of the
phenomenological reduction. It has been shown in Part I how a phenomenological
epistemology and the phenomenological attitude in general is able to incorporate
descriptive epistemological analyses (or other analyses) of the activities of under-
standing as rough sketches of ideal types of complex wholes of different cogitative
types and of the web of one-sided or reciprocal static or generative foundations
between different cogitative types. What has been said can be immediately applied
to two general problems of a historically guided epistemology: the problem of
contingent and necessary conditions in the history of science and the problem
of whether there is a general paradigm, at least for the methodology of the hard
sciences, that includes all methodological program shifts in the history of the hard
sciences.
The distinction between contingent and necessary conditions in the history of the
sciences, and especially in the hard sciences, has been recognized in the epistemo-
logical literature of the end of the last century.12 The distinction between contingent
and necessary historical conditions in the development of a system of higher
understanding is a general problem for the methodology of the historical human
sciences.13 Contingent conditions in the general context of a cultural environment
are external conditions that determine the acceptance or rejection of significant
modifications in a system of higher understanding, but in some cases also of a
new system of higher understanding in this context. Necessary conditions emerge
as immanent conditions in the development of a system of higher understanding.
In the context of phenomenological analysis a necessary condition is a generative
foundation. Necessary conditions, e.g., in the hard sciences, are methodological
problem shifts on the level of the empirical basis caused by certain experiments or,
on the level of the theories, necessary modifications in the mathematical formalism
for the solution of hitherto unsolved problems in the theory.
Bur recent epistemological literature also offers a new analysis of the general
methodological structures of theories that covers the problem shifts in the history
of physics since the sixteenth century.14 This analysis can be used, with some

12
Cf. Cushing 1994, on the fate of Bohm’s theory, e.g., 45; 144f; 175.
13
Cf. above Sect. 6.1, 6.2.
14
Cushing 1994, sections 2.2 and 2.3; the historical fact that this new epistemological approach
was triggered by the specific epistemological problems of quantum mechanics is a contingent
historical condition. Cushing’s description of the structure of theories covers classical as well as
post-classical physics.
7.1 Basic Problems of the Epistemology of the Natural Sciences 167

modifications and a caveat,15 as a guideline for further phenomenological analyses

of the methodology of the natural sciences in general, and especially of the hard
sciences.
(1) Empirical adequacy is the requirement for a phenomenological or semi-
empirical algorithmic formula that can be accepted as an adequate represen-
tation capable of reproducing observed phenomena.16 Here the meaning of
“phenomena” and “phenomenology” is precisely the epistemological under-
standing of phenomenology in the nineteenth century as a preparatory discipline
for scientific research (see Sect. 2.1 above).
(2) An acceptable explanation of phenomena in the hard natural sciences requires
a theory written in mathematical language. Different periods in the history of
physics presuppose the development of different more or less sophisticated
mathematical formalisms. Explanations applying mathematical formalism are
deductive justifications of statements in general, and especially of the empiri-
cally adequate descriptive statements about phenomena mentioned in (1). This
implies that the phenomena are relevant only as measurable observables. The
application of a mathematical formalism is sufficient either for the derivation
and with it the explanation of hypotheses that have to be tested in experimental
research or for the explanation of already confirmed hypotheses. Explanations
within the framework of a mathematical formalism are, furthermore, interested
in the unification of different mathematical formalisms in formalisms of a
higher order and in the reduction of formalisms of lower order to formalisms of
a higher order.17
(3) Understanding a theory of physics presupposes the interpretation of the under-
lying mathematical formalism and the explanation of the empirically adequate
formulas with the aid of the formalism as a representation of the world,
i.e., how the world is seen from the viewpoint of scientific realism. The
understanding of a physical process as a sequence of events has the character
of a story. The understanding of the formalism in its relation to the explanation
of the empirically adequate formulas as a whole is the ontology of the theory.
The ontological interpretation of the mathematical formalism has also been
characterized as belonging to the philosophy of nature and as a meta-physics
of physics.18

15
The caveat refers to some remarks that seem to imply psychologism; cf., e.g., the short
reflections in Cushing 1994, 11/12. The watershed between phenomenology and implicit or explicit
psychologism is the understanding of “phenomenon.” Cushing’s way out is simply to declare
phenomena to be the final court of approval for disputes about science.
16
Cf. Cushing 1994, 10 and 13, on Kepler’s first law of planetary motion.
17
Cf. Cushing 1994, 11 and 13ff.
18
Cf. Cushing 1994, 11ff, and about ontology, 32; 174; 203; cf. Gibbins 1987, ch. 1, about “meta-
physics” and 43ff. and elsewhere about ontology.
168 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

It is not necessary that all of these three aspects of a theory be present

simultaneously. The focus of the interest of experimental physics is the discovery
of semi-empirical formulas on the first level. The corroboration, unification, and
reduction of mathematical formalisms that can be applied in the explanations of
semi-empirical formulas is the main interest of theoretical physics on the second
level. There is no need for the praxis of research in the hard sciences to go beyond
the first and the second level and to add an interpretation of the formalism. To remain
silent about the ontological implications of a theory has been characterized as the
“quietist interpretation,” i.e., to be quiet about possible interpretations. The correlate
of a quietist interpretation is instrumentalism. Theories in physics are an instrument
for the discovery of successful predictions of observable events on the first level.19
It is of no interest for a radical instrumentalist whether or not also physics implies a
higher understanding of nature and the real world. It works for predictions, and what
works for predictions can be applied in technologies. Most physicists have, however,
shared and share the activist and realist attitude. Ontological interpretations of
mathematical formalism are a necessary implement of their research work.20
Some remarks about the categories and the terminology used in this account
are necessary before turning to the phenomenological problems. The categories
used in (2) and (3) are certainly at odds with the basic categories of “explanation”
and “understanding” used in the old distinction between the human and the natural
sciences introduced by Dilthey and Rickert. It is obvious that this concept of expla-
nation implies much more than simple causal explanations. Explanation includes
the explanation of the semi-empirical formula referring to phenomena including the
phenomena, given in the observation of simple causal connections. Understanding
as ontological interpretation of a mathematical formalism is recognized as an
integral aspect of a theory in the hard sciences. This terminology is, however,
at least partially compatible with the categories introduced above in Part I and
applied in Part II. Understanding in the human sciences was characterized as
secondary understanding, as interpretation of fixed life expressions. First-order
understanding includes all types of lower and higher understanding of real and
ideal objects. The natural sciences in general, but also mathematical formalisms
and explanations of phenomena with the aid of mathematical formalism, as
well as the ontological interpretation of the mathematical formalisms applied in
physics, are types of higher understanding. What is left is a difficulty with the
term “interpretation of a mathematical formalism.” Such an interpretation is the
interpretation and application of an abstract formalism to material structures that
can count as material instantiations of the formalism. The ontological understanding
of explanations applying mathematical formalisms can be recognized as a specific
type of theoretical higher understanding. Since the difference in the contexts in

19
See Gibbins 1987, 142; Cushing 1994, 2, 11.
20
Cf. Gibbins 1987. The quietist attitude and instrumentalism, but also positivistic attempts to
reduce the problems to an analytic logico-linguistic problem, surfaced in the wake of the problems
of quantum mechanics.
7.1 Basic Problems of the Epistemology of the Natural Sciences 169

which the term “interpretation” has been used in Parts I and II, on the one hand,
and “interpretation of a mathematical formalism,” on the other hand, is sufficiently
clear, it is not necessary to use a new terminological distinction.
It has to be kept in mind that the phenomenological analysis of the empirical basis
and the cogitative types of scientific research in Ideas II and the Crisis is restricted to
the situation of the development of the natural sciences and the epistemology of the
natural sciences in the second decade of the last century. Husserl as a mathematician
knew Hilbert’s formalistic treatment of formal logic and mathematics. There are,
however, no explicit references in Husserl’s writings to problems connected with
the theory of relativity and, of course, also no references to the problems of
quantum theory. The epistemological background is restricted to the theories of
Neo-Kantianism and the positivism of the nineteenth century. The methodological
and epistemological discussions of the last century beginning with the Vienna
school and Popper, are beyond the historical scope of Husserl’s later writings. There
are, as mentioned, very few phenomenological investigations with interpretations
of the methodology and the epistemology of the natural sciences offered in Ideas
II and Crisis.21 Some interpretations and further explications of difficult passages
and concepts in Husserl’s late writings in this literature are in addition of systematic
significance for a phenomenological epistemology of the natural sciences. There are
also some systematic investigations about the phenomenology of mathematics that
are of significance for the epistemology of the natural sciences.22 It is, therefore,
necessary to begin with a brief exposition of Husserl’s own phenomenological
reflections on the natural sciences and the deficiencies of his account.
The thematic attitude of the sciences presupposes an “abstraction.”23 The
abstraction excludes certain regions of intentional objects. Excluded by the abstrac-
tion that is, according to the Crisis, constitutive for the natural sciences are values,
goods, purposes, goals, means, works of art, etc., or in short, all types of objects that
are in some sense practical and not theoretical. It is, furthermore, of significance
that the abstraction determining the thematic attitude of the natural sciences implies
intersubjectivity in principle. Solipsistic psychic contents, the contents of the
subjective lived experience of individuals and its perspectives, are excluded.24
The description in the beginning of Ideas II is not precise. It covers at least
prima facie not only the theoretical attitude of the sciences, but also a pre-
scientific philosophy of nature, e.g., the theoretical ontology of nature of Aristotle or
Democritus. Closer considerations of the material in Ideas II and the Crisis indicate,

21
Cf. for instance Gurwitsch 1974; Ströker 1987 esp. ch. VII and VIII; Ströker 1987; Harvey
1989. The investigations in Kockelmans 1969, 1985, 1993 presuppose the fundamental-ontological
understanding of “understanding” of Heidegger’s Being and Time.
22
Ströker 1965; Lohmar 1989; Tieszen 1989.
23
Ideas II uses occasionally “reduction” for “abstraction,” cf. Hua IV §§2–4, 25. The Crisis uses
only abstraction. The precise meaning of “abstraction” and “reduction” needs further explication
in the following §§.
24
Hua IV, §18d, cf. Hua III, §52.
170 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

furthermore, that Husserl’s main interests are not the sciences in general, including
the life sciences, but only physics as the prototype of science. The abstraction that
determines the thematic attitude of physics excludes in addition secondary qualities.
Secondary qualities are appearances and are relative. Left in the residuum of the
abstraction are only the primary qualities as causes of appearances.
The application of mathematics in physics as the basic natural science and its
ideal prototype is, according to the Crisis, the essential core of the thematic attitude
of science in general. Mathematics is the language of the theories of physics. Since
Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton mathematics has been understood as a
mathesis universalis, in modern terms as the theory of pure manifolds. Causality is
understood as idealized causality, i.e., whatever is said about causes and effects must
be said in terms of the mathesis universalis.25 The abstraction that is constitutive for
the thematic attitude of modern natural science excludes, hence, all the aspects of
the lifeworld that are of crucial meaning and significance for lived experience in the
lifeworld. This “alienation” from the lifeworld, and the consequences of a scientific
technology for the lifeworld, is the crisis of the European sciences.26
What is missing in the account given in Ideas II and in Crisis is a precise
distinction between the soft natural sciences and the hard sciences, especially
physics. There are almost no passages in the Crisis in which the use of “natural
science” cannot be replaced by “physics.” What is said in the second part of Ideas
II about the constitution of animal nature covers only prima facie zoology. What is
of interest in this section is, however, not zoology as a natural science, but animal
nature as animated nature. The main difference between the “soft” life sciences and
the hard sciences is that life sciences are also interested in primary qualities of their
objects but their descriptions of their objects include also reference to secondary
qualities of their objects. Theories in the life sciences, e.g., Darwin’s theory of
evolution, are not written in the letters of the mathesis universalis. As mentioned
above, their thematic attitude is determined only by the abstraction mentioned at the
beginning of Ideas II.27
It is, hence, necessary to go beyond Husserl, adding to what can be found
in the Crisis a distinction between two abstractions. The first abstraction is a
methodological abstraction that is constitutive for the natural sciences in general,
including the soft sciences. The second abstraction is a methodological abstraction
that has in addition the character of a reductive abstraction. This second abstraction
is constitutive for the hard sciences, especially physics. It implies the exclusion of
everything that is excluded in the first abstraction and excludes in addition secondary
qualities. Left are only the primary qualities, because only primary qualities can be

25
A perfect interpretation of Hua VI, §§ 8–10, the last systematic version of Husserl’s reflections
on the history of the mathematics and physics, can be found in Moran 2013 ch. 3. There are,
however, as mentioned, other works of Husserl and secondary literature that are of interest for a
phenomenological epistemology; cf. also below Sects. 8.1, 8.3.
26
Hua VI, §35.
27
Hua IV, §2.
7.1 Basic Problems of the Epistemology of the Natural Sciences 171

legitimate objects for mathematical theories, theories written in the language of a

mathesis universalis.
It is correct to characterize a mathematical system that includes Cartesian
analytic geometry and the infinitesimal calculus as a mathematical formalism,
a formalized theory of pure manifolds in Hilbert’s sense. This mathematical
formalism admits, however, a comparatively concrete interpretation of objects in
classical physics. It can be understood as a language that captures the principles
of the real nature behind, but not disconnected from, nature as it is given in our
experience of the natural environment in the lifeworld in general. The mathematical
formalism of general relativity theory, and beyond that the mathematical formalism
of Hilbert spaces used in quantum theory, already has virtually nothing in common
with the experience of space and event points in space in our lifeworld. The term
“mathesis universalis” is used univoce with the term “pure manifold” in Husserl’s
late writings. This ambiguity conceals phenomenologically relevant differences
between the different kinds of mathematical formalisms that have been applied in
classical and post-classical physics.28
The thematic attitude of the natural sciences presupposes, as mentioned, the
intersubjective givenness of the objects of sciences. This implies that the thematic
attitude presupposes the basic structures of the lifeworld. It has been mentioned
in the secondary literature that the basic concepts of physics, space, time, mass,
force, and energy, have fundamental roots and corresponding concepts in the pre-
scientific world of everyday life. The concepts of movement, acceleration, and,
last but not least, causality can be added. Phenomenological analyses of these
roots are a task of further investigations.29 An explication of the meaning of “non-
scientific world of everyday life” in terms of Part I of the present investigation is
possible. The concepts of classical physics have their generative foundation in pre-
scientific concepts of elementary understanding, the understanding of the natural
environment, the materials, and the tools that are relevant for the activities of
practical life. The goals and purposes of elementary understanding are excluded by
the first abstraction. The main task of the following sections is, hence, to determine
the remaining aspects of the structure of elementary understanding in the lifeworld
that can count as the generative foundations for the basic concepts of the soft and
the hard sciences in the lifeworld in general. What has to be taken into account
in addition is, furthermore, that these concepts of elementary understanding have
already been interpreted in the systems of the ontological categories of pre-scientific
philosophy on the level of higher understanding. Such pre-scientific philosophical
reflections on categories like matter, form, efficient causality, and formal causality
are, therefore, also generative foundations for the emergence of the natural sciences
in the development of a cultural lifeworld.

28
More about this will be said in Sects. 8.3 and 8.4.
29
Ströker 1997, ch. VII, 177f; examples of such investigations can be found in Ströker 1965, part I.
172 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

7.2 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude

of the Natural Sciences

Phenomena belonging to the empirical basis of the natural sciences in general within
the residuum of the first methodological abstraction are given in intersubjective
sensory experience, in short: intersensory experience. Objects or states of affairs
given in intersensory experience are observables. Intersensory experience, including
intersubjective activities, is a necessary partial structure of lived experience in
the lifeworld, and as such is the one-sided foundation for all other cogitative
types and their intentional objects of elementary and higher understanding. Hence
intersensory experience can be given by itself only as a residuum of an abstraction.
This abstraction excludes (1) all contents of systems of higher understanding
presupposing entities, properties, relations, and structures that cannot be given in
pure intersensory experience. Laws of nature given by God and understood as
an analogue of laws given by a sovereign, the understanding of the evolution of
organisms as following an intelligent design, etc., are not scientific because they
do not have the rank of respectable scientific theories. They cannot be accepted as
scientific theories because they presuppose entities that cannot be given within the
residuum of the abstraction. (2) The abstraction also excludes also all contents of
the subjective aspects of lived experience in the lifeworld, especially the experience
of subjective decisions to act in this or that direction. (3) The abstraction excludes,
furthermore, all practical purposes and goals, in short all “final” causes that govern
all intersubjectively relevant human actions in the encounter with the natural
environment on the level of elementary understanding.
The thematic attitude of the natural science is not a blind stare at intersensory
given observables. It involves an activity, and this activity is guided by an interest
in the “laws” of nature. The scientists work in the laboratory. This interest and this
labor is obviously not excluded by the abstraction. The question is, hence, what
are the generative foundations of this aspect of the thematic attitude of the natural
sciences in elementary understanding in the lifeworld?
Even on the level of passive synthesis, primordial expectation is only an
essentially necessary abstract moment of the temporal structure of the experience
of the hyletic field. The contents of primordial expectations are reciprocally related
to each other in associative syntheses within the continuum of retentions that
determine the contents of protentions as primordial expectations. Such expectations
can be fulfilled and confirmed or disappointed, “falsified” in the upsurge of
new hyletic contents in the actual present. The phenomenological analysis of the
lifeworld in general has shown that expectation occurs as explicit expectation and its
manifestation in predictions on the level of intersubjective experience. Predictions
that can be confirmed or disappointed, i.e., falsified, are according to Sect. 3.5
already necessary abstract moments of the structure of the experience of the natural
environment in elementary understanding.
The experience of regular change in the natural environment is the necessary
foundation both for all practical actions and for the elementary understanding of
7.2 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences 173

these practical actions. The observation of the natural environment teaches the
hunter and gatherer, the farmer, and the craftsmen that some events or actions will be
followed by certain desired or undesired states of affairs “because” this has always
been the case in the past. It is also known in elementary understanding that the
desired or undesired events will not emerge if some circumstances that have been
present or not present in the past are missing or added. It is known in elementary
understanding that some actions have sometimes helped to achieve desired goals
and sometimes not.
Elementary understanding distinguishes, furthermore, several types and aspects
of regular changes in its practical activities. Several aspects of such activities can
be distinguished (1) It is understood that plants and animals grow, develop into a
mature shape, decay, and perish. The elementary understanding guiding herders and
farmers knows how to start this creative and re-creative regular change and to use
it for the realisation of certain goals. Situations that offer favorable circumstances
for such actions are the seasons, and the seasons are governed by the regular, and
hence predictable, movements of celestial bodies. (2) What is understood especially
in the crafts is that certain materials taken from the natural environment can be
shaped by certain actions and means, i.e., tools, to achieve certain desired final
goals. What is experienced in this and other situations are causes that produce
the desired effect either in the immediate spatial and temporal contact between
means and ends, or in a chain of mediated contacts. (3) It is also understood that
it is possible to produce materials with desired new properties by mixing two or
more other materials. (4) However, there are also situations in which certain events
occur because certain objects have the tendency to move in a certain direction or
are attracted by something in a certain direction. The forces that are responsible
for such sequences of events are forces acting at a distance.30 (5) Elementary
understanding of this type includes, last but not least, some elementary knowledge
about arithmetical and geometrical proportions that can be applied in practical
activities of the crafts. (6) It is known, and has social consequences; that the decision
of a member of the intersubjective community to act in a certain way – regardless
of whether the decision is caused by something else or not – is the cause of the
consequences of the action.
Elementary understanding is not guided by the theoretical interest in the discov-
ery of causal connections and laws of causality. Instead the interest is restricted
to the significance of the knowledge (and everything what is implied in this
knowledge) of the causes that can serve as means for the achievement of practical
goals. The “what do you want, it works, and it has always been done this way” is the
answer to all possible further theoretical questions for elementary understanding.

30
Examples are the striving of objects “below the moon” to move down to earth, a striving that
can be more or less controlled by additional actions and their means, e.g., with bow and arrow;
the attraction and repulsion of animals forcing them to move in certain directions, and the forces
behind the movement of the celestial bodies influencing selection of viewpoints that are relevant
for all of these methods.
174 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

The same answer will be given to theoretical questions about arithmetical and
geometrical proportions that can be applied in the process of practical activities.
In the beginning, i.e., in classical physics, the natural sciences were understood
as a new philosophy of nature. As a new philosophy of nature, it is a partial
rejection but also a partial application of the tradition of the pre-scientific philos-
ophy of nature. Except for the radical lingualism of some analytic philosophers,
scientists and epistemologists usually acknowledged that the natural sciences can
be understood as a new philosophy, more precisely as the ontology of nature. The
distinction between pre-scientific and scientific ontologies of nature is, hence, of
some significance for the phenomenological analysis of the implications of the first
abstraction.
Not all meta-genres of higher understanding in a pre-scientific cultural lifeworld
are guided by the interest in contemplative theoretical understanding. The leading
interest of religions is the well-being and salvation of individuals and the commu-
nity. The fine arts and poetry are interested in creating objects for subjective and
intersubjective aesthetic experiences. Pure contemplative theoretical understanding
is the business of philosophy. Philosophical interest in nature in its own right and not
as the natural environment of elementary understanding, presupposes not only the
attitude of contemplation, but also an interest in the discovery of the basic categories
that are already embedded in the structure of the lifeworld in general and in the
experience of the natural environment in elementary understanding. The thematic
attitude of a pre-scientific philosophy of nature brackets all practical goals on the
level of elementary and of higher understanding without denying that there is in
addition also the possibility of a theoretical contemplation of practical life.
The two basic branches of traditional philosophy before the twentieth century,
practical and theoretical philosophy, are considered to be more or less independent
philosophical disciplines. The “ought” is not reducible to the “is” and vice versa.
The object of the contemplation, along with the generalizing abstractions discov-
ering the ontological categories of nature and the essential parts and properties of
different kinds of natural objects, includes final causes and the subjective aspects
of the lived experience of the natural environment in the lifeworld. Seen from
the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology, generalizing philosophical
abstractions have the character of variations of concrete instances in imagination.
More about the significance of the pre-scientific philosophy of nature and its
significance as a generative foundation of science (and especially physics) as a
philosophy of nature will be considered in Sects. 8.3 and 8.4 below.
A pre-scientific ontology of nature is not limited by the first methodological
abstraction that is constitutive for the cognitive attitude of the natural sciences in
general. This has two significant implications. (1) The empirical basis of a pre-
scientific ontology is not restricted to intersensory experience. For instance, it does
not exclude onto-theological considerations. (2) It implies, on the other hand, a
purely contemplative attitude, and precisely this attitude is not a requirement for
the natural sciences. The cognitive attitude of the natural sciences implies, on the
contrary, practical activities guided first of all by the interest in the discovery of
causal relations in the broadest sense.
7.2 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences 175

The thematic attitude of elementary understanding is interested in actions, forces,

means, and ends only to the extent to which they are of interest for the purposes of
practical life. But it is precisely these purposes that are in brackets after the first
abstraction. Partially guided by the theories about the categorial structures of a pre-
scientific philosophy of nature, the thematic attitude of the sciences is interested in
the active search for causal relations and the different types of matter presupposed in
causal relations. It shares the interest of elementary understanding in the discovery
of causal connections without being restricted in this search by the interest in the
purposes of practical life. And, as mentioned, this interest of the thematic attitude of
the sciences is theoretical, but it is not contemplative. It is active because it implies
the actions required in experiments or the hunt for opportunities for observations
that can confirm or disappoint predictions, confirm or falsify hypotheses.
What is left after bracketing the practical interests of elementary understanding
is the interest in the intersensory experience of external objects in the natural
environment. What is left in addition is then (1) the knowledge of causes originally
used as means, and the interest in the effects of causes and the acquaintance with
the properties of materials offered by the natural environment; (2) the experience
that nature creates and re-creates kinds of animals and plants with certain properties
and abilities; (3) the knowledge of the regular movements of the celestial bodies and
their significance for favorable timing of actions and interactions; and last but not
least, (4) some elementary knowledge about numbers, counting, and geometrical
proportions that can be applied in practical activities.
The knowledge implied in elementary understanding and left after excluding
the goals of the activities of practical life is an essential part of the generative
foundations for the emergence of the thematic attitude of the natural sciences. The
pre-scientific experience that an event C is usually followed by an event or sequence
of events E in a situation S of favorable material circumstances at the right time is
still an essential part of the residuum of the first abstraction that is constitutive for
the cognitive attitude of the natural sciences in general.
The cognitive attitude in the residuum is, hence, not reduced to a blind stare at
what happens in perception. It is guided by the interest in observable regularities
that can be discovered in nature. On this level the category of cause and effect is
still an empirical concept, a scheme for many different types of such regularities.
If it is understood in addition as an instance of the formal ontological and logical
conditional relation between C and E in S, then it is given as an instance of the ideal
structure of the cogitative type “theoretical observation” of nature.
Observations and experiments are, according to the early descriptive episte-
mological reflections of Descartes, Bacon, and others the methods of the natural
sciences. A phenomenological reflective analysis of the structure of the cogitative
type “observation” and the cogitative type “experiment” shows that observation and
experiment are not two distinct kinds of methods. Observation in the broadest sense
is the cogitative type in which the observables of the empirical basis of the natural
sciences are given. Several types of observations can be distinguished:
176 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

(1) observations as pure descriptions of observables, of phenomena, the “phe-

nomenology” as a preparatory discipline of the natural sciences mentioned
in Sect. 2.1, where the task is to recognize equal phenomena and to develop
taxonomies for the classification of phenomena;
(2) observations of yes/no tests for expectations, predictions that predict an observ-
able E after the occurrence of an additional observable C in a situation S. Such
predictions are called hypotheses. Two cases can be distinguished:
(2.a) is the case in which the experimenting scientist adds the factor C in a
controlled situation S in the laboratory. This is the experiment in the
narrower sense;
(2.b) is the case in which scientists can neither prepare S nor add C in
controlled experiments. In this case a test of the hypothesis has to wait
for a situation in the natural environment in which S, C, and E are given
as phenomena.31
The tradition of the empiricists from Bacon to Locke praised observation and
experiment, but J.S. Mill, following Herschel,32 developed the first epistemological
analysis of experimental research. His descriptive reflections can be accepted as
a phenomenological analysis of the cogitative types determining the activity of
experimental research and its objective correlate, the state of affairs of relevant
observables for this research for the cases (2.a) and (2.b). Essential for his analysis
of the experiment is the precise description of the factors in a situation S that are
necessary for the confirmation or rejection of a hypothesis. The necessary factors in
S have later been called initial conditions. Seen from a logical point of view, initial
conditions are necessary or replicative conditions, and the added causal condition
is the sufficient or implicative conditional with C in the antecedent and E in the
consequent.33
A real condition is a causal condition, and as such it implies the prediction of its
effect. The relation connecting a real cause and a real effect is, hence, a temporal
relation. For the thematic attitude of the natural sciences predictions are hypotheses
about causal laws. A hypothesis is the assumed prediction that a certain factor or
causal condition C added to a set of initial conditions in the experimental situation S
is the cause for the emergence of a factor E in a temporally following situation S0 . A

31
This was and is the case in astronomy.
32
Cf. Mill 1977, Book III, especially 390ff. Mill and Herschel are immediate forrunners of the
epistemological analyses of experimental research in the twentieth century. The tradition of the
empiricists from Bacon to Locke and Hume praise observation and experiment but they never
offered an epistemological analysis of the methodology of experiments. What follows is not an
interpretation of an epistemological analysis of the methodology of experiments. What follows is
not an interpretation of Mill’s methods; it is a selection of viewpoints that are relevant for all of
these methods.
33
Popper 1968, ch. 3, sect. 12, 59ff. introduced the terminological distinction between initial
conditions and causal conditions in his logico-methodological analysis of the essential factors in
experimental situations.
7.2 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences 177

complete enumeration of all factors in S, S0 , C, and E is necessary. The enumeration

of the initial conditions and their relations in S is particularly crucial, but the
enumeration of the factors accompanying E in S0 is also a necessary requirement
for convincing experimental tests of hypotheses.
Naïve falsificationism is not able to solve all problems of the confirmation or
falsification of hypotheses. They can be solved with the aid of methodological
falsificationism. Falsifying experimental tests of hypotheses can be challenged
with doubts concerning the presupposed experimental situation S, the set of initial
conditions that must be present in experimental tests of hypotheses. The experiment
will fail to give the right answer if such a necessary condition is missing in S or if
an additional initial condition is present in S that prevents the added factor C from
producing the effect E. It is in addition also possible that an additional condition in S0
prevents or seriously modifies the effect E. It is the task of methodologically guided
research to admit possible disturbances of the assumed experimental situation and
to try to eliminate the factors that are responsible for the shortcomings of the
experimental situation in S and S0 . Reliable experiments and observations in the
narrower sense require that all and only the initial conditions required for S must be
present not only for the falsification, but also for the confirmation of the hypothesis.
There are, however, complex situations S in which a complete analysis and
enumeration of the initial conditions in S is practically impossible. The way out
is to compare many instances of S with approximately similar sets of factors and
to check the frequency in which an added factor C is followed by E. Causality that
can be discovered (confirmed or rejected) with statistical frequencies is statistical
causality. Statistical causality of this type is only a problem for the empirical basis
of the first abstraction. It is especially of significance not only for the life sciences,
but also for the social sciences. Not only organic structures, but also social structures
are complex, and many varieties of possibly relevant conditions can be given in
different individual cases of the same kind or in different temporal phases of the
development of the same individual.
A strict description of the initial conditions in experimental situations is practi-
cally impossible, though in this case it is possible, and often plausible, to assume
that it is possible in principle. What can be done in such cases is to select a group
of individuals with the added factor C and, if possible, a control group without the
factor C. The experiment is successful if the predicted effect E occurs in S0 in a
statistically significant frequency in the first group but not in the control group. A
still weaker case is the comparison of frequency curves of probably interdependent
factors.
Statistical causality on the level of the first abstraction is a solution of the
problem of the subjective conditions of the knowledge of the empirical basis of
an experimental situation S. Statistical causality in the hard sciences is objective
statistical causality, e.g., in the kinetic theory of gases and quantum mechanics. This
is not (or at least not only) a problem of the description of the empirical basis. It is at
least possible, e.g., in statistical mechanics, to decipher the theoretical background
of a description of phenomena by applying the formalism of statistical mathematics
with the aid of a deterministic theory of the individual systems behind ensembles
178 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

of individuals presupposed in the statistical description. More will be said about

this below in Sects. 8.2 and 8.3. A first step in this direction requires preliminary
considerations about the second abstraction.
To characterize the second abstraction as the exclusion of the subjective-relative
secondary qualities and the restriction of science, more precisely of physics, to
primary qualities is partially misleading. The second abstraction excludes all
phenomena given in intersensory intuition, all causal relations, and all theories that
cannot be reduced to the language and the logic of mathesis universalis, i.e., to
different types of mathematical formalisms. The second abstraction presupposes,
hence, the first abstraction and is an abstraction within the residuum of the first
abstraction. Thus the second abstraction excludes all qualities, all abstract moments,
that are not measurable, but it includes quantifiable relations within and between
such qualities. The brightness of colors is measurable; even the distance of a color
shade and another color shade in a one-dimensional continuum of color shades
between red and blue is measurable. The exclusion of qualities considered by
themselves as pure qualities is necessary because mathematical formalisms can only
be applied to phenomena that are measurable.
The description just given of the second abstraction implies that sciences under
the first but not under the second abstraction are also but not only interested in
the mathematical explications of the quantifiable aspects of their objects. It is,
furthermore, of crucial significance that the second abstraction is a methodological
reduction because the measurement proportions left under the second abstraction
are supposed to explain secondary qualities and concrete objects insofar as they
are given as objects with secondary qualities. Both the specific character and the
significance of this type of explanation need further explication.
It has already been mentioned that rudimentary knowledge about numbers and
counting, geometrical proportions, and measurement techniques for spatial and
temporal distances are essential implements of elementary understanding in the
activities of pre-scientific, practical social life. What is said about the objects of
geometry as exact essences in Ideas I and the Crisis34 has been considered in Part
I. Not very much can be found in Husserl’s writings about numbers, counting,
and basic arithmetic after his early Philosophie der Arithmetik. The problems of
the constitution of the ideal objects of geometry and arithmetic as correlates of
specific cogitative types and abstractions will be re-considered in the next section.
What has to be added in this section are some preliminary remarks about the
generative foundations of exact geometrical essences and numbers as mathematical
idealizations in the constitution of the lifeworld in general, and especially their
significance for elementary understanding.
Space is originally given as the correlate of the Here versus the manifold of the
There in primordial subjective experience. This experience is not a passive staring of
a passive sensory intuition, but it is a correlate of the kinaesthetic movements of the

34
Cf. Sect. 2.3 above and Hua VI, §9a, together with Beilagen II and III.
7.2 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences 179

living body.35 Space is given as intersubjective space in intersensory perception and

observations and measuring spatial distances is an essential aspect of elementary
understanding; the original meaning of “geometry” is “measuring the land.” The
kinaesthetic foundation of the experience of space is still of significance on this level
of the development of elementary understanding. For example, in the beginning
parts of the human body served as measuring rods, e.g., a foot length.
Knowledge of geometrical figures and their proportions has also been applied
in measuring space and it was also of significance for the practical activities of
using and/or producing tools (and understanding their possible applications) on the
level of elementary understanding. This knowledge is the original material and the
generative foundation for the emergence of rule-guided idealizations and of the idea
of an axiomatic system for deducing the theorems of geometry as a system and a
literary genre of higher understanding.
The sign matter for the signs of numbers was, like the original units of
measurement mentioned above once again originally the human body, first of all
the fingers of the hand. The written signs for numbers in Latin are, for instance,
originally nothing else than “pictures” of fingers, combinations of fingers, and
of hands of fingers taken together, and signs for larger numbers are derived
combinations of such signs. Words or written signs for numbers in natural languages
are originally predicates for collections of approximately equal counted objects
as “individual” units. To talk about numbers as ideal objects in their own right
themselves presupposes a special idealizing abstraction. The essence of “three”
is given in a free variation of collections of different objects with three members.
The constitution of a finite collection of objects presupposes that they are given as
approximately equal individual units for intersensory observation. More has to be
said about counting, collections, and numbers in the following sections.
A summary of what has been said about the empirical basis of the natural
sciences and the abstractions determining the scope of this empirical statement
can begin with some critical remarks about the problems of so-called basic or
observation statements in the analytic tradition. According to the thesis of naïve
empiricism the empirical basis of the sciences is that pure sensory experience is the
passive and therefore truly objective medium of knowledge. The requirement that
observation must be restricted to pure descriptive observation or protocol statements
has had a long pre-history and history in the theory of knowledge and epistemology.
It is easy for critical reflection to show that this thesis has serious shortcomings. That
science and knowledge require beyond this an activity on the side of the subject, and
that this activity is guided by the a priori pre-given structures of consciousness, was
the Kantian way out.
The presupposition that basic statements about observables in the empirical
basis are strictly separable from theories36 has been challenged in the analytic

35
Cf. Part I, Sect. 3.1; Ströker 1965, part I on “Lived Space,” is an exhaustive phenomenological
analysis of the primordial and intersubjective constitution of space.
36
Popper 1968, §§7, 8, 28.
180 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

tradition, but the proposed solutions still have serious weaknesses and are plagued
by puzzles. The first difficulty is that the possibility of intersubjective agreement
and disagreement is plagued by the difficulties of radical translation.37 The second
difficulty is that observation sentences about phenomena on the level of science
are theory-laden.38 Things look slightly different seen from the viewpoint of a
phenomenological analysis of the structures of elementary understanding as the
generative foundation for the thematic attitude of the natural sciences.
Not in all, but in most cases intersubjective agreement or disagreement about
intersensory observations on the level of elementary understanding needs oral
communication. Language and oral communication are one-sidedly founded in
systems of tools and artifacts used in interactions, and interactions are, as mentioned
in Sects. 2.3 and 2.4, founded in the givenness of Others as living bodies in a
natural environment. A linguist who is in addition a philosophical lingualist is thus
convinced that something is given if and only if it is given in language, so that the
limits of the language are the limits of the world, will be trapped in the puzzle of
radical translation.
The puzzle is a problem for the analytic epistemology first of the human and then
also for the natural sciences. However, it is not a problem for a phenomenological
epistemology. It is not the lingualist in the arm chair, but the ethnologist and
even the traveling tradesmen who will be able to decide whether “gavagai” means
“brown,” “rabbit,” or “jumps” if she/or he observes that the jungle man or woman
grabs gavagai, skins it, cooks it, eats it, and offers him a leg of it with a grin.
Language is real language only as an essential abstract part of the structure of the
lifeworld. That observation sentences used in the sciences, whether the human or
the natural sciences, are “theory-laden” has prima facie nothing in common with the
gavagai puzzles.39 Observation sentences are theory-laden because the observation
sentences have to use a restricted system of technical terms and taxonomies.
A science is a science only if it is guided by a methodology, and a methodology
determines the intentional objects that can be recognized as objects of the science.
But this implies certain extensions and restrictions on the vocabulary that can be
used in the observation sentences of the language of the science, and the reasons for
the restrictions can only be derived from the structure of the theories, the language
used in the explanations, and in the interpretation of the explanations. The ways in
which observation sentences are theory-laden presupposes, hence, reflections on the
structure of the theory of the methodology of a science, and this structure is always
in addition an indicator of the abstraction that determines what can count as an
object of the natural sciences in general, both of the soft and of the hard sciences.

37
Quine 1960, ch. 2, §7f.
38
Quine 1996, I, 1–4.
39
What is said about theory-laden sentences in the sciences can be reduced to the gavagai puzzle
if the terminological limits are supposed to be determined by incommensurable methodological
paradigms. Cf. Sect. 7.2 above about Kuhn.
7.2 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences 181

According to a phenomenological epistemology science presupposes intersen-

sory experience. It has its immediate foundation partially in the categorial structures
of elementary understanding that have not been excluded after bracketing the
practical purposes of elementary understanding in its natural environment. The
observation statements of everyday life are already “theory-laden” in this broad
sense and the observation statements in the sciences are theory-laden because
oral communication on the level of elementary understanding is the generative
foundation of the restricted interest of science in the laws of nature.
Elementary understanding is the foundation of the natural sciences but it is
already a historical fact and beyond that even a generative eidetic impossibility that
the natural sciences could emerge without further mediating steps in the generation
of cultural lifeworlds on the level of higher understanding. Necessary generative
foundations for the emergence of the natural sciences in a cultural lifeworld are in
addition a sufficiently developed geometry together with a sufficiently developed
algebra and a philosophy of nature, a contemplative reflection on the ontological
structure of nature in general.
What is left after the first and the second abstraction determining the thematic
attitude of the hard sciences is not an ensemble of sense data given in pure
passivity. What is given in pure passivity is the hyletic field. The pure sense
data given in the hyletic field are given in intersensory intuition as the already
understood correlates of subjective and intersubjective activities of practical life
in elementary understanding. The first abstraction already excludes the interest
in, and the knowledge of, the purposes and goals of practical life in its natural
environment. What is left, however, is the knowledge about causal relations in the
broadest sense and the possibility of the application of rudimentary geometrical and
arithmetical thought in this knowledge. The guiding interest of the natural sciences
within the residuum of the abstractions is not the interest in a methodologically
guided broadening and systematizing knowledge about what is useful in the natural
environment, but an interest in discovering regular change, the laws of nature in
general. The pursuit of scientific truth is an activity like the activities in elementary
understanding, this activity implies intersubjectivity. Scientists work, they “labor” in
the laboratory, travel to collect observations or collect reports of other travelers, and
they do this in a lifeworld with sciences. This implies that even the thematic attitude
of the physicist includes the physicist’s ability to read instruments, and this reading
presupposes “secondary qualities.” The bracketing of the interests of practical life
required for the pre-scientific contemplative ontology of the philosopher sitting
in the armchair or walking leisurely up and down the hall implies a bracketing
of getting involved in any immediate encounters with the natural environment of
elementary understanding. In contrast, the first methodological abstraction that is
constitutive for the natural sciences brackets the practical interest, the purposes and
values determining elementary understanding, but it does not bracket the immediate
encounter and active interference with the natural environment of elementary
understanding.
This description of the thematic attitude of the natural sciences has consequences
that support the validity of the proposed explication of the implements of the two
182 7 The Empirical Basis and the Thematic Attitude of the Natural Sciences

abstractions. Sciences need instruments, and in the beginning these instruments

were provided by elementary understanding, e.g., scales, clocks, measuring devices,
etc. No meta-genre of higher understanding, including philosophy, has ever had an
immediate impact on elementary understanding. In contrast, science not only pre-
supposes the pre-scientific technologies of elementary understanding from the very
beginning, but has then also significant consequences for the further development
of practical life and elementary understanding. It is not the sciences considered
for their own sake, but the practically significant output of the sciences in the
development of new technologies that had and still has serious economic and social
consequences. A cultural lifeworld with sciences is necessarily also a lifeworld
with scientific technologies in and for elementary understanding. Science depends
vice versa in its further development on the invention of instruments used for
observations and in experiments with the aid of a scientifically guided technology.40

40
Cf. Sect. 9.2 below.
Chapter 8
The Structure of Theories in the Natural
Sciences

8.1 The Problem of the Application of Mathematical

Formalisms in the Natural Sciences: Historical
and Phenomenological Preliminaries

The theories of the hard sciences, physics and astronomy and later chemistry,
have been understood in the period of classical physics from the sixteenth to the
nineteenth century as philosophy of nature written in the language of mathematics
and guided by mathematical principles; According to Galileo, the book of nature
is written in mathematical language,1 and according to Newton the principles of
the philosophy of nature are mathematical principles.2 The paradigm shifts of
mathematics and theoretical post-classical physics emerging the nineteenth and the
beginning of the twentieth Century have their generative foundations in classical
physics and the mathematical theories that have been applied in classical physics.
The reflections of an epistemology guided by the historical question of what
scientists really did, and then of a phenomenological epistemology, must begin
with reflections on classical physics. Of interest is, therefore, first of all the type of
mathematics that has been applied in the explanations and the ontological categories
that governed the philosophia naturalis of the Cartesian and then the Newtonian
traditions.
The emergence of physics as a natural science in the modern sense presup-
poses as its main generative foundation the development of sufficiently developed
mathematical theories. A brief summary of some relevant viewpoints taken from
the history of mathematics in the Western tradition can provide a preparatory

1
Galileo, Discorsi e demonstrazioni mattematichi interno a due nuove scienza, Arcetri 1638, Opere
prima edizione completa, ed. E. Alberi, Florenz 1842–56, VI, 171.
2
The title of Newton’s magnum is: opus Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, London,
1687.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 183

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_8
184 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

orientation. Rules for the handling of practically relevant geometrical problems

have been known and used for the purposes of elementary understanding in several
oriental cultures. But Euclidean geometry is the first axiomatic system for the exact
essences of spatial configurations and as such is a new prototype of a genre of higher
understanding. Geometry as the ideal prototype of a perfect science whose theorems
can be deduced from axioms with a set of strictly defined rules was of significance
for Aristotle’s attempt to develop an axiomatic system of the logic of the syllogism.
It was later the ideal prototype for a science in general, and especially for the physics
and even the metaphysics more geometrico of Descartes and Hobbes.
Numbers, counting, and elementary arithmetical operations were already imple-
ments of the elementary understanding of the natural environment in cultures
without a written tradition. Number systems surface in the development of cultures
with a written tradition. Their significance for elementary understanding grew with
the practical applications of astronomical calculations for the calendar, with more
or less complex mechanical devices, and with economic transactions. Arithmetic,
together with music and astronomy, was, however, also recognized as a theoretical
discipline in Classical Antiquity.
Only fragments of the arithmetical literature of Classical Antiquity were avail-
able for the early Middle Ages, but arithmetic, together with geometry, music, and
astronomy was one of the disciplines in the quadrivium in the system of the artes
liberales. It was, however, also recognized as the art of the masters of reckoning
in medieval towns, i.e., an art that had been developed and was immediately
applicable for the purposes of practical technical and economic activities.3 In the
early medieval Western tradition this art of reckoning and arithmetic as a theoretical
academic discipline was restricted to the art of reckoning with the abacus. The art
of the “abacists” was later refined by the techniques of the “algorithmetists.” They
introduced the Arabic—originally Indian—number system including 0 as a number,
along with general formulas using variables for numbers in the definition of the rules
for arithmetical operations and in algebraic equations.
Presupposing the progress of algebra culminating with Vieta in the Renaissance,
Fermat and Descartes developed analytic geometry, the reduction of geometry to
algebra. The next step was the discovery of the differential and integral calculus by
Leibniz and Newton. From then on, geometry was not an independent discipline
but, together with arithmetic and algebra, a branch of mathematics. The language of
a mathesis universalis became in addition the ideal prototype and the medium not
only for the construction of theories, but also for the deduction of new hypotheses
from already established universal causal laws in the natural sciences. Until the
beginning of the nineteenth century progress in mathematics was a correlate of the
progress of the hard sciences, and mathematics itself was usually itself considered
as a natural science.

3
More about this aspect of the development of mathematics as a science and its significance for
economics as a human science will be said in Sect. 10.5.
8.1 The Problem of the Application of Mathematical Formalisms in the. . . 185

The situation changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. What is new
is the development of non-Euclidean geometries and higher algebra. Lower algebra
was restricted to real numbers, including, beyond whole numbers, rational numbers,
algebraic numbers, and transcendent numbers. Real numbers and lower algebra
were been sufficient for the purposes of the application of mathematics in classical
physics. Subsequently, however, the scope of mathematical formalisms was no
longer restricted to mathematical theories that can be applied to physics on the one
hand and to a philosophical interpretation of mathematics as a natural science on the
other. Higher algebra includes imaginary numbers and complex numbers. Riemann
developed his modern theory of functions and its application to the problems of
Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry 50 years before Einstein applied parts of
this theory in his theory of relativity. Aspects of Hilbert’s theory of number spaces
(including imaginary, and with them, complex numbers) could be applied later in
the mathematical formalism of quantum theory. These problems will be considered
in the following sections. The scope of available mathematical formalisms was
larger than the scope of their possible applications in post-classical physics. Some
extensions of mathematics have not been of interest for the mathematical formalism
of explanations in post-classical physics at all.
Frege and after him Russel tried to prove that the foundations of mathematics
and the principles of mathematical proofs can be derived from formalized logic
and set theory. Gödel discovered the limits of the ideal of completeness for a
universal deductive formalism based on axioms. The philosophical implication of
the new mathematical techniques triggered philosophical disputes. Frege rejected
psychological interpretations of mathematical objects and defended their character
as “Platonic” ideal objects. Hilbert, on the contrary, preferred the interpretation
of mathematics as a pure formalism. Husserl sided with Frege in his attack on
psychologism, but followed Hilbert in his interpretation of mathematical and logical
formalisms as objective correlates of formalizing abstractions. The intuitionists
following Brouwer and others rejected actual infinities as possible objects of
arithmetic, analysis, formalism, and axiomatic theories in the theory of numbers.4
As mentioned previously, the first abstraction determines the cognitive attitude
of the natural sciences in general. The abstraction has its generative foundation in
the immediate contact of elementary understanding with the reality of the natural
environment, but it brackets the immediate interest of elementary understanding
in the practical applicability of confirmed causal relations permitting reliable
predictions and explanations. The cognitive attitude of the natural sciences is
theoretical, interested in the causal relations governing nature in general. The
discoveries of elementary understanding have the character of a haphazard
search for useful materials and applicable causal relations. In contrast, research
in the natural sciences presupposes the methodology of the experiment for the
confirmation of hypotheses and the explanation of events with experimentally

4
Cf. Tieszen 1989, chs. 1 and 8, but also passim for a thorough discussion of the different schools
and their relation to the phenomenological approach in the epistemology of mathematics.
186 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

confirmed causal laws. The second abstraction governing the cognitive attitude of
the hard sciences brackets all phenomena, hypotheses, and explanations that are not
explicable in terms of mathematical theories.
The basic epistemological question connected with the second reduction is why
and how mathematical theories can be used as perfect instruments for explications
in the theories about causal relations that are accessible under the first abstraction,
especially in physics and then in the hard sciences in general. This question
immediately implies the second question of why and how all phenomena given
in intersensory experience under the first abstractive reduction are explicable
in mathematical theories in the residuum of the second abstractive reduction.
A phenomenological solution for the problems would be the phenomenological
counterpart of the Kantian transcendental justification for the axioms of intuition
and the applicability of mathematics to all objects given in experience. Kant’s
answer presupposes his hypothetical construction5 of the “conditions (Bedingungen)
of a possible experience” in the transcendental deduction of the First Critique.
A phenomenological solution presupposes the analysis of the cognitive attitudes
under which mathematical objects and theories about mathematical objects are
given and the relation of their givenness to objects that are given as real objects
of experience, first of all in elementary understanding and then for objects under the
first abstraction of the natural sciences.
Kant’s solution for the problem of the application of mathematics to physics
as an empirical science is restricted to classical physics and is not applicable to
post-classical physics. Progress in mathematics was immediately progress for and in
classical physics. The situation is different for post-classical physics. The transitions
from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry and classical analytic geometry to non-
Euclidean spaces, from lower algebra to the extensions of higher algebra, and finally
the analysis of non-Euclidean spaces with the aid of extended algebra happened
before physicists applied a selection of the newly discovered mathematical for-
malisms. Given this situation, it is a question of terminological simplicity to use
“classical mathematical formalism” and “post-classical mathematical formalism”
parallel to the distinction of classical and post-classical physics.
Given these distinctions, it is necessary to distinguish between (1) the phe-
nomenological analysis of the cognitive attitude in which geometrical and arith-
metical objects are already given in the pre-scientific structure of elementary
understanding; (2) a phenomenological analysis of the cognitive attitude and the
objects given in it in classical physics and the classical mathematical formalism
applied in classical physics, and (3) the cognitive attitude of post-classical mathe-
matical formalisms and their application in post-classical physics.6
Several aspects of the problems mentioned have been treated by Husserl in Ideas
I and Ideas II, in the Crisis, and in Experience and Judgment. There are also

5
Following the Neo-Kantian interpretation of the transcendental deduction.
6
Euclidean geometry is the generative foundation for a possible development of non-Euclidean
geometries.
8.1 The Problem of the Application of Mathematical Formalisms in the. . . 187

helpful recent interpretations of Husserl’s phenomenology of mathematics in the

literature offering in addition necessary corrections and extensions of Husserl’s
analyses.7 These analyses have, however, shortcomings that need preparatory
critical comments. The justification of application of mathematical theories to
phenomena given in intersensory experience is the basic task for an epistemology
of the hard sciences, especially physics. Neither Husserl’s writings nor the literature
offer an analysis of the application of mathematical theories, its scope and its
limits, in the context of empirical research in the natural sciences. The analyses
are restricted to mathematical research and are not interested in the epistemological
problems of the objective validity of “axioms of intuition” in the Kantian sense.
Intersubjectivity is mentioned occasionally in Husserl’s phenomenological analyses
and in this literature, but the reader is left with the impression that these analyses
consider only the cogitative type, the intentional acts and their ideal objects, of the
consciousness of individual mathematicians in splendid isolation. A consequence
of this approach is the impression that mathematical objects given in categorial
intuition have nothing to say about objects in the real world.8
Husserl’s remarks on the genetic foundations of idealizing mathematical abstrac-
tions in Experience and Judgment are mentioned occasionally in the literature.9
What is missing is the phenomenological analysis of the generative foundations
of the givenness of mathematical objects in intersubjective generative structures,
especially the intersubjective structures of elementary understanding. The genera-
tive foundations of mathematical idealizations in elementary understanding are of
crucial significance for a phenomenological solution to the problem of the objective
validity of mathematical idealizations for real objects given in the spatial and
temporal structure of the lifeworld. They are of basic significance because they are
still present in the cognitive attitude of empirical research in the natural sciences in
the residuum of the first and the second reductions. The restriction to the analysis
of the intentional structures of the intentional acts and the intuitions of an isolated
idealizing consciousness in which the ideal objects of mathematics are given is a
necessary abstraction, but it is insufficient for a phenomenological analysis of the
applicability of such ideal objects to real empirical objects in the natural sciences.
According to Ideas I and elsewhere mathematical objects are exact essences.
Exact essences in this sense are given in axiomatic systems. Geometry is mentioned
as an example,10 but Ideas I 11 and then the Crisis12 also use the term “exact
essences” in a narrower sense. Exact essences are objects of geometry and not
mathematical objects in general, i.e., they are exact essences in their own right

7
Rosado Haddock 1973, 1987; Schmit 1981; Miller 1982; Ströcker 1987; Lohmar 1989; Tieszen
1989; Hopkins 2011.
8
Cf. the critical discussion in Lohmar 1989, 210 and 213.
9
Cf. e.g., Lohmar 1989, 214; and on E J in general, 43, 70, 73.
10
Hua III/1, §8.
11
Hua III/1 §74.
12
Hua VI §9a and Husserl 1950, Beilage II and III.
188 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

before the relations between such essences can additionally be deduced in the
axiomatic system of Euclidean geometry. The exact essences of geometry are given
in idealizing abstractions presupposing variations in imagination that are guided by
the rule of the linear “and-so-on” toward an ideal limit in space. The rule of the and-
so-on in the variations distinguishes exact from morphological essences. Space as
the medium of the variation is originally given as an abstract moment of the genus
extension. It follows, though it is not mentioned explicitly in Husserl’s writings, that
the rule of the and-so-on determining exact essences should also be of significance
for other abstract moments for the genus extension, first of all time.
Exact essences are, according to Husserl, “ideas in the Kantian sense.” The
reference to ideas in the Kantian sense indicates that the rule of the and-so-on
itself implies temporal sequences. It has been mentioned in Sect. 2.3 that even the
variations in imagination required for the constitution of morphological essences
cannot be understood as variations of “free” fantasy. They are guided by rules,
and these rules are determined by categorial structures given in formal categorial
intuition. The rule of the “and-so-on” tacitly implies the structure of linear progress
in countable steps. It will be shown in the next section that the rule of the and-so-
on has its foundation in the categorial structure of mathematical ideal essences in
general, including numbers.
What is said about geometry as a theory of exact essences in Ideas I and in
the Crisis is an almost sufficient static phenomenological analysis of the original
givenness of the objects of Euclidean geometry. It is, however, an open question
whether what is said about exact essences as given in and-so-on variations is a
sufficient phenomenological account of the givenness of numbers and arithmetical
operations. An attempt to give an answer to this question will be offered in the next
section.
Ideas I announced a phenomenological analysis of the how of the givenness of
exact mathematical essences in mathematical idealizations in general. However, not
very much is said is said about natural numbers; about basic arithmetical operations;
about the process in which the universe of different types of real numbers (and
numbers beyond real numbers) can be generated with the aid of such operations;
about algebra; and about analytic geometry.13 What can be found in Husserl’s
later writings about collections and numbers are some references in Formal and
Transcendental Logic and the Crisis to the treatment of the theory of numbers and
collections in the early Philosophy of Arithmetic and beyond that in Experience and
Judgment a phenomenological analysis of the original givenness of finite sets, i.e.,
collections and numbers in the context of the analysis of categorial structures and
their genesis.14
The phenomenology of mathematics is restricted to the analysis of Leibniz’s idea
of a mathesis universalis and the theory of definite manifolds following Hilbert’s
formalistic theory of the system of axiomatic deductive systems in Formal and

13
Cf. the remarks above about non-Euclidean geometries.
14
Hua XVII 27a and Husserl 1987, §61; cf. Tieszen 1989, ch. 7, §3.
8.1 The Problem of the Application of Mathematical Formalisms in the. . . 189

Transcendental Logic. The problems of the levels of generative foundations in the

development of mathematics are, hence, reduced to phenomenological analyses of
their significance in the context of mathematics as mathesis universalis and the
theory of definite manifolds.15 The considerations of the problem of the application
of mathematics in the natural sciences in the Crisis presuppose this understanding of
mathematics.16 It will be shown at the end of the next section that this understanding
of mathematical formalisms causes difficulties.
A phenomenological account of the givenness of arithmetical mathematical
objects has to start with the analysis of the abstractions that are implied in
the original givenness of collections, i.e., finite sets, natural numbers, and basic
arithmetical operations. Such accounts in the literature after Husserl had to translate
the psychological analyses of the Philosophy of Arithmetic into the context of
phenomenological analyses.17 This translation requires the analysis of the cogitative
types in which numbers and finite sets are given. The analysis has to consider two
aspects: the characteristic structure of the intentional object, and the intentional acts
in which the intentional objects are given.
Following Husserl numbers are objects of categorial intuition. The task is, hence,
(1) the description of the specific categorial structures of numbers as objects of
mathematical idealizations and (2) the analysis of the specific acts of categorial
intuition in which numbers are given.18 The description of the temporal structure
of the intentional acts is an essential implement of (2). To presuppose for this
purpose the structure of inner time-consciousness, i.e., time-consciousness on the
primordial level,19 is a misleading consequence of a phenomenology of mathematics
that restricts itself to the analysis of the intentional acts of a consciousness in which
mathematical objects are given in splendid isolation. Formal categories given for
categorial intuition are, however, formal categories for any objects whatsoever.
There are no distinct objects on the level of primary passivity and activity in
passivity. Inner time is a temporal flow of hyletic contents emerging in the present
actual Now and flowing down in the continuum of retentions. The representation
of this flow in Husserl’s graph representing the dimensions of the flow can be
misleading because the graph represents the phases of the flow in fixed spatial
dimensions. The representation itself and the segments in this representation are,
however, only intersubjectively accessible spatial analogues of the structure of inner
time and its hyletic contents. They should not be taken as a descriptive “picture” of
inner time-consciousness in the primordial sphere.

15
See Hua XVII, §§30 and 31.
16
Hua VI §9e.
17
See the evaluation and the critical remarks of Lohmar 1989, 72f, about Miller 1982.
18
With a grain of salt it can be said that Tieszen 1989 is primarily interested in the problem of
mathematical intuition, i.e., in (2), but admits, 175, that a fuller account of acts of categorial
abstraction should be pursued, i.e., (1). Lohmar 1989 is primarily interested in (1) but mentions
problems of temporality in passing, cf. esp. 60, 97–100.
19
Tieszen 1989, 103, 107, 148.
190 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

It is, however, also possible to apply the graphs to the temporal structures of
intersubjective temporality in the lifeworld because the givenness of objects in
general presupposes this structure.20 The analysis of the cogitative types in which
natural numbers are originally given in the process of collecting and counting inter-
subjectively given objects presupposes the analysis of the structure of intersubjective
temporality in the lifeworld. The center of intersubjective temporality is the inter-
subjectively shared actual Now as the center of its horizons, i.e., the intersubjectively
shared past and the intersubjectively shared future horizon. In this structure the past
is pre-given as a sequence of past temporal phases that is explicable in the intentional
acts of reproductions of lived experiences in which events, i.e., intersubjectively
accessible states of affairs including distinct objects, have been given. The future
is not the empty protention of the emergence of new contents, but the explicit
expectation of events in the future horizon of the actual Now.
It is, hence, advisable to begin the analysis on this level and to ask how
collections and numbers are given in intersubjective experience, first of all for
the intersubjective experience and the temporal and spatial structure of elementary
understanding. To start with elementary understanding is furthermore advisable
because elementary understanding is one of the generative foundations for the
methodology of the experiment of the natural sciences in general after the first
abstraction. The analysis of the givenness of numbers, finite sets, and basic
arithmetical operations and their application in practical activities for elementary
understanding is, hence, a possible key for the solution of the problem of the
applicability of the ideal objects of mathematics to the real objects of the hard
sciences in the residuum of the second abstraction.21

8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their

Application in the Natural Sciences, and Their
Foundations in the Lifeworld

A phenomenological version of Kronecker’s famous dictum “Whole natural num-

bers have we by God, everything else is the work of men”22 is “Natural numbers
and basic arithmetical operations are given in the lifeworld for elementary under-
standing, everything else is the work of mathematics as a science belonging to
higher understanding.” What has to be distinguished is the categorial synthesis
of categorially formed representations of objects and categorial intuition as the
intuition of the categorial forms as ideal objects.

20
In the next section Tieszen’s analyses will be translated into this intersubjective context, i.e.,
retention into active reproduction and protention into open-ended expectation.
21
On natural numbers and counting, cf. Lohmar 1989, ch. 3; Tieszen 1989, ch. 5; Hopkins 2011,
part II.
22
Cf. Lohmar 1989, 21 fn. 23.
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 191

The process of counting on the level of elementary understanding presupposes

the givenness of collections of things. The things given in a collection must already
be categorially formed and intersubjectively given objects. Their categorical form
has to fulfill two requirements: they must be given as distinct units, and they are as
such wholes of the first order, organic wholes, or wholes of a higher order23 ; and
they must be either approximately equal as wholes or approximately equal in one or
more of their dependent and independent parts.24 A collection of things can be pre-
given as a whole of the togetherness of things in space in some configuration, such
as a collection of apples in a basket or a flock of sheep. Or collections can be given
in the temporal process of collecting things as the product or artifact of the activity
of collecting. Things in collections given in the process of collecting are connected
by “and.” This “and” in collections connects things and not judgments or properties
of a thing in a judgment. It is the “and” that indicates the act, the operation of adding
objects one by one into a collection.25
Counting presupposes either the collecting of things one by one into a collection
or a re-collecting of a pre-given but not yet counted collection of things, starting
with a deliberately chosen thing and adding other things one by one. Counting
as an intentional act implies intentional objects that are given in two intentional
perspectives. On the one hand, there is the presently given number of things in the
already counted collection, the numerical quantity (Anzahl) of things in a finite set of
things. On the other hand, the things are given in a temporal sequence of intentional
acts starting in a past Now in the past horizon of the actual Now, and this temporal
sequence determines and represents the sequential ordering of the counted things in
the collection.26 In this case and on this level the double perspective of temporality
can be represented in a graph.27
Counting as the counting of intersubjectively given things implies the recognition
of the intersubjective validity of the number of the counted things. This recogni-
tion presupposes the intersubjective accessibility of the process of the subjective
intentional activity of counting, and this accessibility presupposes life expressions,
signs for numbers, and numbering. Such signs refer to numbers and must, hence,
be the same for counted things in general. Signs are themselves intersubjectively
given things, but their function is not to represent themselves, for as symbols they
represent numbers of counted “anythings whatsoever.” This step is the first step

23
To collect red spots on a blue background, apples, and families in a village together in one basket
is meaningless for elementary understanding; cf. Part I, Sect. 3.2.
24
In elementary understanding it also makes no sense to collect and then to count together things
like Paris, a lamb, and a dirty spot on a white shirt.
25
For the following see Lohmar 1989, 52ff. As mentioned above, the following analysis pre-
supposes the structures of elementary understanding. It is not restricted to the analysis of the
intentional acts and the intentional objects of subjective consciousness by itself.
26
The double perspective is the pre-figuration of the distinction between cardinal and ordinal
numbers in elementary understanding.
27
Cf. Tieszen 1989, Fig. 3, 148.
192 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

toward mathematical idealizations leading beyond elementary understanding but

this idealization once again has its generative foundations in pre-figurations on the
level of elementary understanding and in concrete bodily actions.
The most primitive signs designed for representing numbers as generalizing
abstraction are series of strokes “/ / /” or “/ / / / /.” The representation of numbers
with strokes is limited to collections that can be given in intersensory intuition
in one glance in the living present. Larger systems require sign systems using
signs for counted collections that can be given in one glance in combination with
strokes such as the Roman numeral system or combinations of signs for smaller
number collections in combination with an additional sign “0” for counting larger
collections of things. A simple system of such signs representing the number of
anything whatsoever is the abacus. The beads of the abacus are things representing
things and collections of things, and the acts of shifting the beads represent (and
are on this level identical with) basic arithmetical operations adding, subtracting,
multiplying, and dividing.
The givenness of things of this type as “units” is the presupposed foundation for
possible synthetic acts of collecting them into a collection including as the cases
“many things,” “one thing,” and the limiting cases of “all things” and “no-thing.”
The old definition of numbers as numbers of units is on this level not a mistake,
but it is restricted to the context of counting things and, therefore, an insufficient
definition of the formal categorial structure of number. The categorial structures
determining the process of an intersensorally accessible counting of things and
reckoning operations with the aid of the beads of an abacus are useful devices for
elementary understanding, first of all for simple economic transactions, but they are
not yet objects of mathematical categorial intuition in their own right.
The first step in this direction on the level of elementary understanding is the
application of numbering in measurements. There are properties, dependent parts, or
abstract moments of things as wholes that admit continuous increase and decrease.
Most of such increases and decreases either immediately refer to spatial extensions
or can be translated into changes of spatial extensions with certain devices, e.g.,
temporal distances with the pointers of a clock and weight with the pointer of a pair
of scales. Space is an abstract moment of the genus extension given as a dependent
part not only of concrete objects, but also of all relations between concrete objects,
including Others as living bodies given in intersensory experience in the lifeworld
in general and for elementary understanding.
The simplest case of measuring is the measuring of spatial distances in one
dimension of space. Space is an abstract moment and therefore not countable by
itself in the same way that concrete objects given in space are. To count space
presupposes the determination of units in space. Space as a continuum does not
itself offer units, but it is possible in elementary understanding to produce an artifact
that is able to serve as a measuring rod representing a “piece” of a linear one-
dimensional extension in space as an artificial substitute for a concrete object given
in space. A measuring rod, e.g., a yardstick or a meter, is designed to determine an
individual unit of a one-dimensional spatial extension. The use of this unit requires
the abstraction from all other properties of the measuring rod. The measuring rod
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 193

is supposed to represent—not to be—a measured distance that is spatially not

approximately equal but exactly equal to any other spatial unity of the size of the
measuring rod. Pre-given distances larger than the yardstick can be measured by
repeated steps of measuring.
The first immediate implication of measuring a one-dimensional spatial exten-
sion is that adding to a collection of exactly equal distances and counting what
is added can proceed indefinitely. The second immediate implication is that the
extension of the measuring device can itself be measured by dividing it in exactly
equal smaller parts that are able to measure the extension of the originally chosen
unit, a meter in decimeters, centimeters, and millimeters, and so on in indefinitum.
The unit of spatial extension determined by the measuring device is indefinitely
divisible in denumerable steps. The third implication is the possibility of using these
devices to measure the distances of two points a, b, in space from a third point c
between them. Negative whole numbers of things can already be represented on the
abacus in calculating borrowing and debts for economic purposes. The counting of
spatial units in two directions from a point is the perfect idealized representation of
positive and negative numbers and the point c representing 0.
The units of measured distances are exactly equal because the units are exact
essences. They are exact essences, first of all because what is measured is the
length of a straight line and, secondly, because the two endpoints as limits of
the measured distance are, as points, also exact essences. The prototypes of exact
essences according to Ideas I are the geometrical ideal essences presupposed in
Euclidean geometry, the first prototype of a mathematical science. However, what is
said in Ideas I and the Crisis about the givenness of exact essences needs, as already
mentioned in the previous section, further explications.
The medium of the idealizing abstractions of plane geometry belongs to the
genus extension and prima facie only to the genus spatial extension. The foundation
of the idealizing abstraction is in the last instance the realm of the intersensory
givenness of concrete wholes of the first order and their spatial relations. The
idealizing abstraction presupposes as a preparatory step the abstraction of the
dependent part “spatial extension” belonging to this realm of concrete objects. Such
an abstraction requires that the abstract moment “spatial extension” can be fixed
as invariant in an indefinitely open variation of qualitative abstract moments in
imagination. A specific configuration of spatial extension (e.g., in the simplest case a
straight line, or else a complex configuration, e.g., a triangle,) can, therefore, only be
given in a series of variations of contrast phenomena constituted by varying visual
qualities in different pictorial representations. Thus, like essences in general, it is
not given by itself in any of its pictorial representations.
The second step of the idealizing abstraction, i.e., the step that is emphasized
in Ideas I, is the variation in imagination that is directed toward an ideal limit,
e.g., a straight line as the shortest connection between two points. This variation
of the “and-so-on” additionally presupposes as its medium the abstract moment of
the genus temporal extension, i.e., temporal sequence. The immediate consequence
of the idealizing abstraction that is constitutive for geometrical objects as exact
essences is that they cannot be given in a sequence of pictorial representations
194 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

because they are given as exact essences only as the ideal limit of such a sequence.
This type of givenness can be called “quasi-pictorial” because it implies abstractions
that are one-sidedly founded in pictorial representations. The temporal aspect of the
givenness of geometrical objects is not relevant for geometrical objects as objects
of Euclidean geometry, but it will be shown below that it is constitutive for the
possibility of measuring spatial distances.
A phenomenological answer to the problem of the “objective validity” of such
exact essences, i.e., the possibility of their application to concrete wholes and
relations between concrete wholes, can only be found in an analysis of operations,
practical actions in the lifeworld. Geometrical exact essences as ideal limits of
the and-so-on variations cannot be given as such in intersensory experience in the
lifeworld. Examples for beginning segments of this progress toward an ideal limit
are pre-given in practical rules of elementary understanding. How to produce bodies
with approximately plane surfaces and straight edges is an art that is practiced in
many crafts, e.g., masonry and carpentry. It is an art that presupposes the production
of tools that are themselves artifacts, and is the presupposition for the construction of
other mechanical devices.28 Geometrical laws, e.g., the Pythagorean theorem, have
also been applied in geometry as the “art of measuring” the land. The “and-so-on”
toward the ideal limit of an idea in the Kantian sense has, hence, its foundation
in practical activities of elementary understanding. The presupposition for such
beginning segments of an “and-so-on” are objects that are bodies given in the space
of the lifeworld and determined by the intersubjectively pre-given spatial-temporal
structure of the lifeworld.
Beyond that, the law for the variations in imagination of the and-so-on toward an
ideal limit can be determined in this context as the and-so-on of the denumerable
progress toward smaller and smaller units of measuring. This is the foundation, the
presupposition of the possibility of the application counting equal units of spatial
distances in measurement in pre-Euclidean geometry as the art of measuring the
land in elementary understanding. The application of arithmetical operations to
measuring the land permits calculating the size of the geometrical shapes of two-
dimensional surfaces, and beyond that the volume of three-dimensional bodies. The
latter is of practical significance for the measuring of fluids.
Measuring presupposes counting and numbers. But in addition, the application
of numbers to measurements is the generative foundation for the recognition of
numbers as exact mathematical essences. The “equal” between one unit and another
unit and a certain number of units with the same number of other units has to
be “exactly equal.” Numbers can be used to count approximately equal concrete
wholes of the first order; they can be used to count different kinds of abstract
moments, e.g., colors; they can be used to count different concrete objects that
have the same abstract moments in common, e.g., yellow things; they can be used
to count different colors on a surface of a concrete object or different tones of
a melody provided, these are given in contrast phenomena; they can be used to

28
Hua VI §9, mentions mechanical devices.
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 195

count deliberately determined equal segments separated by strokes representing

ideal limits on a ruler. The givenness of numbers in counting as an intentional
activity presupposes the one-dimensional temporal flow, and this presupposition
predetermines the one-dimensional order of numbers in the process of counting.
Numbers are given as ideal objects as categorial structures of counting, i.e.,
collecting, and with it of simple abacus arithmetical operations that can be reduced
to counting. The unity of numbers given in counting lies beyond the categorial
difference between the unity of things as concrete wholes, the abstract dependent
parts of concrete wholes, and the abstract properties of things, and is equally
applicable to all of them.29
The possibility of applying reckoning operations to the indefinitely open universe
of whole numbers and the indefinite divisibility of a number into fractions of
numbers that have themselves a numerical value pre-given in elementary under-
standing is the foundation for the emergence of arithmetic as a discipline of higher
understanding and as a science. The added presupposition is an abstraction from the
fetters of the practical applications in elementary understanding, i.e., from abacus-
arithmetic. Left are numbers and operations with numbers as ideal objects or, more
precisely (and in terms of a phenomenological epistemology), as ideal categorial
forms of collections, i.e., sets. Numbers on this level are not given in counting.30
The basic categories of formalizing mathematical abstraction given in categorial
intuition are unit, collection, and number. They have a higher level of univer-
sality and are therefore possible predicates of concrete wholes, dependent parts,
independent parts, foundation relations, and relations between concrete wholes.
Mathematical units are, furthermore, not units that have the character of indivisible
atoms. The units are determined as unities only in their relation to exactly equal
other units in collections, the one unit and the many units, without determining
in what respect they are equal. It is, therefore, also possible to divide these units in
collections of subordinated collections of “smaller” exactly equal units. The relation
between manifolds and unity on the level of mathematical formalism as a part of
formal ontology is a correlation.

29
The reader of the end of EJ and passages in other writings of Husserl is left with the impression
that the formal ontological categories of collection and unit are on the same level of universality
together with the categories of wholes and parts. It is, however, compatible with Husserl’s texts
to assume that they are of higher universality than the set of categories comprising the theory of
the wholes and the parts. Concrete wholes are units and there are collections of concrete wholes,
but their dependent and independent parts can also be considered as units and can be counted, etc.
This will be of special significance for the phenomenological analyses of the ontological status of
theories in the life sciences in Sect. 8.5.
30
Hopkins 2011 criticizes Husserl’s concept of number for its Aristotelianism and psychologism,
i.e., for determining what number is only in the analysis of process of counting; cf. 100, 391,
and 400. Hopkins l.c. 527/28 recommends as a remedy to Husserl’s analyses in FTL and EJ
Klein’s interpretation of Vieta. The problem with this criticism is that Husserl claims to share
Hilbert’s position and Hilbert’s formalism. Hilbert is not mentioned in Hopkins’ book. The
question is, hence, whether Hilbert can also be criticized for the same type of psychologism and
Aristotelianism.
196 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

Collections are manifolds with a certain number of units, but such collections can
themselves be treated as units. This is already the case with counting and reckoning
on the level of elementary understanding. Collections of three apples can be counted
if there is a collection of a higher order of, e.g., four such collections. The collections
are units because they are exactly equal. A reckoning operation is able to determine
the number of all apples in the four collections: 3 C 3 C 3 C 3 D 12. And the number
12 is also a name for a collection that in turn can be treated with other collections of
the same size as a unit. The operation to the left in the equation above has the same
power as the operation 4  3 D 12 and hence 3 C 3 C 3 C 3 D 4  3 D 12.
The general principle of the correlation of unit and collection is that any number
of units in a collection standing by itself (i.e., without being connected with other
numbers by mathematical operations to the right of an equation sign or with complex
mathematical expression with operators to the left) can be treated as mathematical
unit. This principle is also of significance for the mathematical “discovery” of
transcendent numbers like ; of the imaginary unit I31 ; of imaginary numbers as
the product of the imaginary unit i and a real number; of complex numbers as the
sum of an imaginary number and a real number; and of the ordered sequence of
transfinite numbers with the lowest unit ¨ as units.32
In the literature mentioned above, the application of mathematics to physics
was understood as the application of mathematical formalisms without raising the
further question of possible stages in the development of mathematical formalism
and of different types of mathematical formalisms. There is also no trace of an
interest in this question in Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the significance
of mathematical formalism for a mathesis universalis as the theory of definite
manifolds in Formal and Transcendental Logic and for the application of the
mathesis universalis to the natural sciences in the Crisis. An analysis of the specific
structures of arithmetic and algebra as disciplines of higher understanding before
the period of classical physics, in classical physics, and then finally in post-classical
physics is missing. This approach neglects the potential of a generative analysis of
different levels in the development of mathematical formalism and its significance
for the scope and the limits of the application of mathematics in the empirical
sciences. A historical reminder is appropriate before turning to the problems of
a phenomenological analysis of the generation of steps in the development of
mathematical formalism.
The constitution of numbers and simple arithmetical operations and of pre-
scientific, i.e., pre-Euclidean geometry as the art of measuring space are inseparable
in and for elementary understanding. Euclidean geometry and arithmetic/algebra

31
The root of –1 D i.
32
Almost nothing has been said about mathematical operations and in general about operations on
the level of the formal ontological mathesis universalis in Husserl’s texts and in the literature. What
is said here is only sufficient for the purposes of an analysis of the problems of the application
of mathematical formalisms to theories in classical physics. It is not sufficient for post-classical
physics.
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 197

were considered as two different arts33 in the system of academic disciplines on

the level of higher understanding for the millennium after the Elements of Euclid.
The separation was a consequence of the discovery that theorems about properties
of geometrical figures that can be synthetically constructed with straight edge
and circle in plain geometry are deducible from a system of axioms without any
application of measuring and arithmetical operations, a discovery presented in the
first four books of the Elements.34
The progress of algebra in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance was the
presupposition of the possibility of the generative foundation of the discovery of
analytic geometry. The algebraic treatment of geometry, i.e., analytic geometry,
is able to solve not only geometrical problems of Euclidean plane geometry,
but also the geometry of curved surfaces and the geometry of three-dimensional
configurations in space. It is in this sense a systematic extension of the art of pre-
scientific geometry and arithmetic considered in the beginning of this section, but
it is also a return to the original inseparability of geometry and arithmetic in the
activities of measuring on the level of elementary understanding. Geometry and
arithmetic/algebra were considered as different branches or aspects of mathematics
and not as separate disciplines. This assertion needs further explications.
The points of two- and three-dimensional space are represented in a system
of three coordinates, i.e., straight lines with segments of exactly equal length
representing numerical values crossing each other at right angles in a common
zero point. All points in two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces can be
represented by pairs or triplets of real numbers. Thus by the same token a space as
geometrical space is of real numbers; not only straight lines, but also curves in two
dimensions, figures on planes, planes with curvatures; and three-dimensional figures
of bodies can all be represented in algebraic equations. The indefinite progress of
counting can be understood as an indicator of the infinite. Any number of exactly
equal chosen units on the coordinates can be increased by adding the next unit in
an and-so-on toward the infinite as a mathematical idealization. Likewise, the limit
zero is a mathematical idealization in the regress of dividing a unit into smaller
and smaller parts of a unit that are themselves units toward zero as an ideal limit
given in mathematical idealization that can be represented in the equations of the
infinitesimal calculus.
Of special significance for the applicability of Cartesian/Newtonian mathemati-
cal formalism to classical physics as an empirical science is, furthermore, the theory
of transformations, especially Galileo’s transformation of vectors and systems of
vectors. A vector as a straight line can be determined by its beginning points and its
direction in a two- or three-dimensional system of coordinates. Systems of vectors
are systems of covariant magnitudes of vectors. A Galileo transformation is the

33
Arts are not sciences about that which “really is” in the context of the ontology of Aristotelianism.
More about this will be said in the next section.
34
There are some attempts to apply geometry to the solution of arithmetical and algebraic problems,
but not vice versa in books written later by other authors.
198 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

invariant transformation of vector systems from one system of coordinates (x0 , y0 , z0 )

into the original (x, y, z) system of coordinates. A phenomenology of mathematics
would have to say more about classical algebraic geometry, but what has been said
is sufficient for a phenomenological account of the applicability of this analytic or
algebraic geometry and its extensions in the differential and integral calculus to the
intersensorially given objects in classical physics as an empirical science.
It is also of significance for a phenomenology of mathematics that the application
of algebraic or analytic geometry in classical physics can be understood with
hindsight from the viewpoint of the development of mathematics in the nineteenth
and twentieth century as the application of a mathematical formalism. However,
the classical mathematical formalism that was applied in classical physics has the
special property that its immediate referents are mathematical idealizations and not
formal essences given in formalizing abstractions. These mathematical idealizations
can be represented in the quasi-pictorial figures of analytic geometry. They are
quasi-pictorial because, like the straight lines and configurations of straight lines
representing the objects of mathematical idealizations in Euclidean geometry, they
serve as indicators for the mathematical idealizations that are present in the progress
itself as the ideal limit, which, however, is never given by itself. The medium of the
representation of such progresses and-so-on in infinitum is, however, the spatial and
temporal structure of subjective and intersensory experience in the lifeworld.
The system of coordinates ultimately has its generative foundations in the
structure of right and left, before and behind, and above and below determining the
possible directions of the kinaesthetic movements of one’s own living body and the
location of other bodies within this structure.35 The system of this structure is also
given as a multiplied system of systems of spatial orientation in the recognition of
the Other and Others as other living bodies. Intersubjectively given objects in space
are given in this pre-scientific context as the same objects in different locations
in the intersensorially given space of the relative intersubjectivity of a homeworld
of consociates. The object, e.g., a bush on a hillside given from the viewpoint of
my body as to the right and above, can be given as below and to the left when
seen from the viewpoint of another living body to the left and above both my
living body and the bush. The object is an intersubjectively given identical object
in both perspectives, i.e., it is recognized as a transformation of the same object
from my perspective to the perspective of the Other and vice versa. The first steps
of a progress and-so-on are, as mentioned above, already given in the context of the
elementary understanding of practical activities in the lifeworld as the and-so-on in
the givenness of simple geometrical figures and the application of numbers and in
simple arithmetical operations in measuring.
A terminological remark is necessary before turning the problems of the applica-
tion of post-classical mathematical formalisms to post-classical physics. Descartes,
following Galileo’s distinction between the compositive and the resolutive method,
distinguished between the synthetic and the analytic method. The paradigm for

35
Cf. the descriptions in Ströker 1965, part I, section I.
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 199

the distinction between the methods was at this time the distinction between
synthetic and analytic geometry. Euclid’s strictly deductive axiomatic method in
plane geometry was the paradigm of the synthetic method.36 However, according to
a widespread thesis of analytic philosophy, geometry was also understood later as
an empirical science because it is synthetic. “Synthetic” is in this case understood
as “empirical” in accordance with the analyst’s interpretation of Hume’s and Kant’s
analytic/synthetic distinction.37
The thesis is acceptable for phenomenological analyses if “empirical” means,
first of all, that the idealizing abstractions and variations required for the givenness
of geometrical entities have their foundations in the elementary understanding of
the structure of intersensory experience and secondly that geometry is applicable
to intersensory phenomena precisely because it has its generative foundation in
this structure. The thesis is not acceptable if it means that geometrical objects
are empirical concepts given in variations guiding the generalizing abstraction in
which first empirical concepts and then morphological essences are given. Ideal
geometrical objects are exact essences given in variations guided by the rule of
the “and-so-on” in space toward an ideal limit applied to the pre-given structures of
elementary understanding of spatial figures, but it must be underscored that numbers
and basic arithmetical operations are also empirical in this sense. Both have their
generative foundation in the elementary understanding of and in practical activities.
Physics was a philosophy of nature based on mathematical principles. Progress
in mathematics was at the same time progress in classical physics, and mathematics
was, hence, usually understood as a branch of natural science. The situation is
different for post-classical physics. Not all mathematical theories developed in the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century had been applied in post-
classical physics, and the applied mathematical theories were developed before
being applied in post-classical physics. The leading viewpoint for the following
rough survey of the development of mathematical formalisms in this period is again
the problem of the applicability of mathematics, i.e., its objective validity in physics
as an empirical science. Three levels in the development of mathematical formalism
can be distinguished: (1) the mathematical formalism of the classical algebraic
formalism applied in analytic Euclidean geometry. (2) the post-classical formalism
of extended or higher algebra that can be applied in addition to non-Euclidean
geometries of the Nineteenth century; and (3) Hilbert’s formalistic interpretation
of mathematical axiom systems.
(1) Pre-scientific reckoning is interested in the application of operations and
constructions. It is not interested in the operations and constructions themselves.
Geometry on the one hand and arithmetic and algebra, on the other, are inter-
ested in the operations and abstract relations between any numbers and figures

36
The methods of non-Euclidean geometries of the nineteenth century have also been considered
as synthetic methods in this sense.
37
Only logically true sentences are “analytic.”
200 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

whatsoever, and beyond that, in the system of operations and in the definitions
of operations of a higher order in terms of operations of a lower order. The use
of variables for numbers and measured distances marks the watershed between
pre-scientific reckoning and geometry and arithmetic/algebra as theoretical
disciplines of higher understanding. At the same time, it is the first step in the
development of mathematical formalizing abstractions.
Variables used in Euclidean geometry refer, e.g., to straight lines a, b, c and
angles ’, “, ” of triangles in the verbal formulations of theorems and axioms.
Variables for numbers in arithmetic are used for the definition of the properties
of arithmetical operators, e.g., a C b D b C a. They require in addition constant
symbols for arithmetical operations. The use of variables in algebra as a theory
of equations introduced by Vieta presupposes the use of the variables and constants
of arithmetic and adds variables for unknown numbers x, y, z that can be calculated
first in equations with one unknown x in linear equations, e.g., in x C b D 0 and in
quadratic and cubic equations including square roots, cubic roots, etc. Equations
with more than one unknown x, y, z, require complex operators of a still higher
order.38
The main point is, however, the introduction of numbers as a science of symbolic
numbers, i.e., not definite amount of definite units, but abstract multitudes. The
“lower algebra” that was applied in classical physics can already be characterized
as the first step of mathematical formalizing abstractions, the step of an algebraic
formalism39 that is restricted to mathematical operations on representations of
variables for any real numbers “whatsoever” given in categorial intuition. Algebraic
formalism has, considered for its own sake, a larger potential and this potential
reveals itself in the higher algebra of post-classical mathematics in the nineteenth
century and its applications in post-classical physics.40
The variables used in the classical mathematical formalism of Cartesian analytic
geometry, together with its extensions introduced by Newton and Leibniz, refer to
ideal objects that have the character of mathematical idealizations. As mentioned
above the idealizations indicated in the graphs of analytic geometry have their
foundation in the medium of the spatial and temporal structures of lived experience
in the lifeworld. They admit quasi-pictorial representations, i.e., representations
that serve as indicators of exact essences given in mathematical idealizations. The

38
For instance, †, f(x), • f(x).
39
The first steps from traditional descriptive theories of formal logic to formalized logic have been
called “algebra of logic” because of the use of variables for subjects, predicates, logical particles,
and sentences. The use of the term “algebra” is in this case a metaphor. The variables do not
refer to numbers in arithmetical operations and algebraic equations. On the technique of algebraic
formalization that can be also applied in formal logic, see Lohmar 1989, 21f.
40
Of significance for this problem is Hopkins 2011, 75f, cf. 522 on Klein’s interpretation of Vieta’s
algebra. Klein, like Husserl, did not distinguish between classical and post-classical mathematics
and physics, but his interpretation implies that as a symbolic mathematics, Vieta’s algebra already
had the full potential of application to numbers beyond real numbers.
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 201

variables of the classical formalism applied in classical physics is, therefore, also
indirectly applicable to objects given in the spatial and temporal structures of the
lived experience of the natural environment in the lifeworld.
(2) The referents of the fully developed post-classical algebraic formalism are
formal ideal essences given in formalizing abstraction. The “presupposition of
the possibility” of the transition from classical formalism to a pure algebraic
formalism was and is that the classical mathematical formalisms of analytic
geometry and formalistic reflections on the Euclidean axiomatic system in
geometry imply problems that cannot be solved in classical mathematical
formalism. The transition has two aspects. The first is the transition from
Euclidean geometry to the Non-Euclidean geometries. The second is the
transition from lower or classical algebra, the algebra that was applied in
classical analytical geometry and the infinitesimal calculus, to the extended
algebra including transcendent, imaginary, and complex numbers.
Two steps in the development of non-Euclidean geometries can be distin-
guished.41 The first step still admits quasi-pictorial representations and the synthetic,
(i.e., axiomatic theoretical) presentation of the non-Euclidean geometries. The
parallel postulate had been a problem ever since Classical Antiquity. Euclidean
geometry presupposes a plane surface as its medium. Given the background of
analytic geometry, it was possible to represent curved surfaces in hyperbolic
geometries, e.g., parabolic geometry. The parallel postulate can be replaced by
other assumptions about parallels, including both the assumption that the sum of
the angles of a triangle is not equal to two right angles and the assumption that the
length of a straight line is unlimited. The objects of such geometries are still exact
essences, mathematical idealizations that admit quasi-pictorial representations.
The second step is the algebraic treatment of non-Euclidean geometries in
extensions of classical analytic geometry and the infinitesimal calculus as pure
mathematical formalisms, now including numbers that are only accessible in higher
algebra.42 The extended algebra is not restricted to the mathematical analysis of
curved surfaces; it also includes the possibility of an algebraic analysis of curved
three-dimensional spaces, and in general spaces with n dimensions. Quasi-pictorial
representations of such spaces are impossible. It is possible to use quasi-pictorial
representations of curved surfaces to indicate some essential features of curved
spaces, but such representations are representations per analogiam, analogical
representations. It is tempting to use the term “symbolic representation” for such
representations, but in the context of mathematical and logical formalisms, the

41
What follows is a brief and rough account of some points that are essential for the specific
character of the development of mathematical formalisms at the end of the eighteenth and in the
nineteenth century from Lambert to Riemann, taken from the thorough phenomenological analysis
in Ströker 1965, part II, section III. On the significance of Riemann’s comprehensive account
of non-Euclidean geometries and of the higher algebra that is required for the analysis of these
geometries in analytic geometry, see Lohmar 1989, 11, 15f. 175.
42
See Ströker 1965, part II, section III, ch. 3.
202 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

term “symbol” is a general term for variables, operators, and even syntactical
notation. Quasi-pictorial representations have a strong heuristic value because they
are indicators for the rule-guided variations and-so-on in a progress indicating
an exact essence in mathematical idealizations. Analogical representations only
highlight some structural features of the represented ideal object of a formalizing
abstraction and have, therefore, only a weak and limited heuristic value.
The problem of the impossibility of quasi-pictorial representations of spaces
with more than three dimensions is of special significance for the application of
post-classical mathematical formalisms in post-classical physics. The transition to a
four-dimensional system of coordinates still seems to be loosely connected with the
formal structures of intersensory experience if the fourth dimension is understood as
representing time. However, even a mathematically idealized representation of the
temporal dimension of lived experience is only a weakly analogical representation
for a four-dimensional space, and there is in general no possibility for quasi-pictorial
representations of n-dimensional spaces.
The process of formalizing abstraction begins with the use of variables for any
numbers whatsoever of algebra, and this level was sufficient for the development
of classical analytic or algebraic geometry. The second step, the development
of higher algebra and the algebraic representation of non-Euclidean geometries
culminating in the extension of Riemann’s approach in pure number-spaces had its
generative foundation in the first step.43 Euclidean geometry and classical analytic
geometry admit quasi-pictorial representations of geometrical “spaces” as indicators
of the process of idealizing mathematical abstractions. As mentioned, the “spaces”
of non-Euclidean geometries admit such quasi-pictorial representations only as
representations per analogiam.
The transition from Euclidean to non-Euclidean space presupposes, hence, the
representations of such geometries in the mathematical formalisms of extended
algebra, including extensions of the integral calculus and the differential calculus.
The borderline between classical mathematics and post-classical formalisms is the
distinction between irrational numbers that can be given as solutions of algebraic
equations, i.e., the algebraic irrational numbers, and irrational numbers that cannot
be given as solutions of algebraic equations, including the transcendent numbers44
and the imaginary and complex numbers.45 All transcendent numbers are irrational,
but not all irrational numbers are transcendent.
Such numbers have been mentioned occasionally in the tradition, but a systematic
theory of transcendent numbers has only existed since the second half of the
nineteenth century, and it has been shown that the set of all transcendent numbers

43
For a detailed account see Lohmar 1989, I. 1.a.
44
E.g.: e D 2. 718281828 : : : D ideal limit of the sequence n ! 1 of
(1/1 C 1/2 C 1/3 C : : : C 1/n : : : ) or D 3.1415926536 : : : the most simple case of a
transcendent number of a transcendental curve that can only be represented by transcendental
functions.
45
Cf. Lohmar 1989, I.1.b and c.
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 203

is non-denumerable while the set of all algebraic numbers is denumerable. Seen

from the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology classical mathematical
formalism still includes formulas whose referents are mathematical idealizations
that can be given in quasi-pictorial representations. The watershed between clas-
sical mathematical formalisms and post-classical mathematical formalisms is the
transition to transcendent numbers. The transition is the necessary consequence of
applying the rules for the basic mathematical operations to numbers that, according
to Kronecker, were not pre-given by God, but constructed by human operations.
The operations in mathematical theories with irrational numbers are not the
same as, but are still isomorphic with, the operations in the theories of rational
numbers. This is no longer the case for imaginary and complex numbers. The
problems connected with roots of negative numbers have been known since the
sixteenth century. The term “imaginary numbers” was introduced by Descartes for
the square roots of negative numbers. The applicability of imaginary and complex
numbers for the simplification of trigonometric functions was discovered at the end
of the eighteenth century. There was no systematic theory of imaginary and complex
numbers before Carl Friedrich Gauss, who introduced the number i as the imaginary
unit in 1832. What follows is a rough summary of basic formal definitions.
An imaginary number bi is the square root of a negative real number. The real
part in bi is any real number b and i the imaginary unit. A complex number has the
form a C bi. The real part of a C bi is a. The imaginary part is bi. An imaginary
number can be defined as a complex number where the real part D 0. Complex
numbers cannot be ordered like real numbers, i.e., rational and irrational numbers,
according to increases of their quantity. The mathematical operations on complex
numbers need special definitions. All complex numbers z D a C bi have conjugates.
The conjugate of z D a C bi is z* D a–bi. z*is the reflection of z about the axis of
the real number, and the conjugate of z*, z**, is z.
It is possible to design graphic representations for complex numbers, e.g., in
an Argand diagram. The Argand diagram is a complex plane, i.e., the Cartesian
two-dimensional plane of classical analytic geometry. One axis is the axis of real
numbers. The other is the axis of imaginary numbers. But this axis is just not
Cartesian. What can be ordered on a Cartesian axis in a Cartesian plane are real
numbers. but imaginary numbers are not real numbers. The representation is a weak
analogy that has only a limited heuristic value.
(3) The final step in the development of mathematical formalism presupposing
the other steps as its generative foundations, is Hilbert’s formalism. Hilbert’s
formalism is not only a formalistic interpretation of arithmetical and algebraic
operations; beyond that it is a formalistic interpretation of axiom systems
and normative principles for mathematical constructions of axiom system in
general. It is not of significance for the application of mathematical formalisms
in physics as an empirical science. Relevant for the present investigation is the
significance of Hilbert’s formalism for the phenomenological theory of formal
apophantic logic and formal ontology, i.e., the phenomenological analysis of
logical and mathematical formalism.
204 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

Husserl already mentioned the problem of the theory of definite manifolds for
universal mathematics, i.e., the mathesis universalis, in Ideas I and in Formal and
Transcendental Logic, he compared the ideal of definite manifolds with Hilbert’s
normative meta-mathematical principle of completeness for mathematical axiom
systems. Husserl’s idea of a theory of definite manifolds is, hence, a theory of
formalized axiom systems in Hilbert’s sense. Husserl distinguished within the
mathesis universalis between formal apophantics (i.e., formal logic) and formal
ontology as correlates, and within formal ontology between the axiomatic system
of the theory of the whole and the parts and axiomatic systems of mathematics in
the narrower sense, e.g., for arithmetic and geometries. It is obvious but no means
clear in Husserl’s writings that only axiomatic systems of mathematical formalisms
in the narrower sense, and not the mathesis universalis in general, is of possible
interest for the problem of the application of mathematical formalisms in physics.
Recognizing that his project of a mathesis universalis and Hilbert’s normative
ideal of complete axiom system cover the same ground, Husserl emphasized that
the philosophical background of Hilbert’s and his own discovery are different.46
Three problems must be distinguished: (1) the problem of an explication of the
rational motives behind the request for such radical methodological principles, and
the meaning and significance of definite manifolds and the norm of completeness for
axiom systems; (2) the problem of the difference between Hilbert’s and Husserl’s
philosophical background; and (3) the question of the possible consequences of
the differences in philosophical background for a critical evaluation of the ideal
of definite manifolds and of Hilbert’s normative principle.
(1) The algebraic treatment of Euclidean and the non-Euclidean geometries in
the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century neglected the
significance of the methodological ideal of systems of deductive axiomatic
inference, an ideal that was originally realized in Euclidean geometry. The task
was, hence, to realize this ideal for arithmetic and algebra and for the application
of algebra in analytic geometries. There was a general agreement that axiom
systems are meaningless if they admit the deduction of contradictions. Given
this and only this principle, it was possible to admit modifications of axiom
systems if consistency can be saved.
The answer of the intuitionists or constructivists to such daring extensions of the
scope of mathematics was that mathematics must presuppose the original intuition
of counting and natural numbers. The existence of kinds of numbers beyond natural
numbers can be admitted only if they can be constructed in a finite number of
steps of operations. The main victim of this restriction is Cantor’s theory of the
hierarchy of transfinite ordinals, the “actual infinite” as an object of mathematics.47
The mathematical and meta-mathematical epistemological challenge was to develop
a theory for the justification, the scope, and the limits of axiomatic systems in

46
Cf. Hua III/1, §72, and Hua XVII, §31.
47
See Lohmar 1989, 31; cf. Tieszen 1989, 8f., 12f., 46f., 100f.
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 205

mathematics. There are no problems in this respect for a Platonic epistemology of

mathematics. Mathematical objects are ideal objects, and the realm of ideal objects
is larger then the realm of what can be given in the intuition of the intuitionists.
The intuition of such ideal objects is the final arbiter of the objective validity and
significance of mathematical theories.
Hilbert’s formalism implies the rejection of quasi-psychological and meta-
physical presuppositions in meta-mathematical theories. The task was, hence, to
develop formalistic meta-mathematical restrictions on axiom systems. The syntactic
principles for complete axiom systems are as follows: (a) the extension of the
system by adding a new axiom that is not derivable from the other axioms implies
inconsistency of the system; and (b) all syntactically correct expressions using the
symbols that occur in the axioms must be either derivable or refutable. According
to the comparison in Formal an Transcendental Logic these principles are also
principles for the phenomenological ideal of definite manifolds.
(2) Hilbert recognized that intuition, in phenomenological terms intersensory
intuition, of finite configurations of signs is a necessary presupposition for
mathematical operations.48 The meaning of signs is, however, not of interest
for the analysis of the methodology of the construction of axiom systems.
It is of interest only for the application of axiom systems to objects. This
“nominalistic” restriction of intuition to the analysis of sign systems is not
acceptable for mathematical Platonism, i.e., for Frege’s and the Gödel’s
recognition of mathematical objects and especially mathematical axioms, as
ideal objects. It is also not acceptable for intuitionism, i.e., the recognition of
mathematical objects as constructions based on the original intuitive givenness
of natural numbers.49
However, it is not acceptable for phenomenology either. Phenomenology rec-
ognizes that signs given in sign matter for intersensory intuition are a necessary
presupposition for all intentional acts referring to objective meaning and signifi-
cance, but signs are signs only if they refer to objects, and this presupposes that
they have objective or intersubjectively accessible meaning. Symbols are understood
as signs for intentional objects of formal logic and formal ontology given in
formalizing abstractions. The objects of mathematical symbols belong to the formal
mathematical categories, including individual unit, set (i.e., manifold), ordered
set, and finally axiom system.50 Like mathematical Platonism phenomenology
recognizes ideal objects, but it is, in addition, interested in the analysis of the
constitution of the givenness of ideal objects.

48
Cf. the quote in Tieszen 1989, 7; see Lohmar 1989, 204.
49
Tieszen 1989, ch. 1, offers a survey of the different positions in the epistemology of mathematics
in the Twentieth Century and analyses—see the index in Tieszen 1989—of the meaning of
“intuition” as a phenomenological category and in Frege, Gödel, Brouwer, Parsons, and others,
cf. Lohmar 1989, I.3.
50
Hua XVII, §33.
206 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

However, according to Jacob Klein’s interpretation even in the analyses of

Formal and transcendental Logic and Experience and Judgment Husserl was not
able to give an account of the genesis of formalizing abstraction in general, and
especially of the genesis of algebraic formalisms in mathematics, because he
presupposed a psychologistic Aristotelian theory of abstraction.51 An answer to
this criticism has to start by making a distinction within the general problem of
“formalizing abstraction.” The special problem of formalized representations of
units and manifolds (i.e., multitudes or amounts of units) in algebraic formalizations
will be considered below.
Categories have been understood not only in the Aristotelian tradition but also
in the tradition of modern empiricism as highest genera that can be reached in
generalizing abstractions. Husserl distinguished from the outset between material
essences, essences of abstract moments, i.e., dependent parts, essences of concrete
wholes, (i.e., morphological essences), and formal essences.52 It is already the case
that the theory of the constitution of material essences in Husserl (who followed
Stumpf in this respect53 ) cannot be reduced to traditional theories of abstraction. The
phenomenological analysis of the constitution of the givenness of formal essences
cannot be reduced to any theory of the givenness of material essences because
a phenomenological analysis of the constitution of material essences implicitly
presupposes the structures of formal ontology.54
Of basic significance for the understanding of Husserl’s transcendental-
phenomenological reflections on modern formalized logic and a mathesis
universalis from Frege to Hilbert is in this respect the understanding of the
German terms “Etwas” or “Etwas überhaupt.” A translation with “anything” in
English without further comment can be misleading. “Thing” in “anything” can
be understood in an Aristotelian context as a “first substance,” as a “this here” in
general, e.g., possible referents of authentic numbers in the process of counting
things, but “Etwas” in Husserl’s sense is able to refer also to properties, quantities,
relations, etc. of first substances. “Etwas” in the context of the Formal and
Transcendental Logic is, hence, able to refer not only to things as first and higher-
order concrete wholes but also to abstract moments, i.e., qualities, extensions, and
relations, and in addition even to abstract material and formal essences. In short,
the referents of “etwas” are all possible intentional objects. The “etwas überhaupt”
is, hence, an explication of the “meaning” of variables “x” in formalized systems
in general, of the mathesis universalis even before specifying certain regions of
intentional objects of special formalized systems.

51
Cf. Hopkins 2011, §§41, 162, 167, 173.
52
A prefiguration in the philosophical tradition in this respect is Kant’s distinction between formal
categories and their schematized counterparts in the axioms of intuition.
53
Cf. above §1.
54
Cf. above §§2, 3.
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 207

(3) Hilbert’s normative ideal of completeness and consistency for axiom systems
and therefore also Husserl’s theory of definite manifolds as a phenomenological
explication of this ideal were refuted by Gödel’s proof soon after the publication
of Formal and Transcendental Logic. Gödel’s proof has shown that the method-
ological ideal of completeness for axiom systems cannot be realized in systems
as rich as the Principia Mathematica, i.e., systems that imply the Peano axioms,
first of all mathematical induction. The applicability of the normative principles
is restricted to comparatively simple systems, e.g., an algebraic system for
an extensional interpretation of formalized first-order logic.55 Gödel was a
Platonist in this sense and had, hence, no reason to assume that the result of
his proof is a partial mathematical skepticism.
The situation is different for a “nominalistic” interpretation of algebraic symbols.
There is the need for normative syntactic principles that restrict the arbitrariness of
free play with systems of symbols. All of them are acceptable as long as they do not
violate the principle of non-contradiction. Hilbert’s methodological principles for
axiomatic mathematical formalisms are an attempt to develop a meta-mathematical
theory that restricts the arbitrariness of free play with symbols in the framework of
a nominalistic interpretation of symbol and formalism. This attempt failed, and the
failure also implies a failure of nominalistic formalism. Formalistic constructions
with symbols that have no restrictions determined by the essence of the objective
referents of the symbols are not able to separate meaningful constructions from an
otherwise free play with empty systems of symbols.
A first question for a phenomenological epistemology of mathematics and
especially of mathematical axiom systems, is whether Gödel’s results imply a
refutation of the ideal of a mathesis universalis as a universal theory of definite
manifolds that is itself a definite manifold and, therefore, imply also a refutation
of such a phenomenological explication of Hilbert’s normative meta-mathematical
principles for formalized axiom systems. The second question is whether Gödel’s
results imply further difficulties for Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology of
mathematics, first of all for the very project of a mathesis universalis. Both questions
have been discussed in the literature since the third decade of the last century. The
answer to the first question was yes. The final answer to the second question was
no. There is no reason for a phenomenology of mathematics to adopt Hilbert’s
rigorous normative principle.56 Phenomenological accounts are descriptive, not
normative. The descriptive result is that there are some axiom systems that are
definite manifolds and some others, including the project of a mathesis universalis,
that are not complete in Hilbert’s sense.
Some concluding remarks about Husserl’s understanding of ideal essences in
general are necessary before turning to the question of the possibility of the
application of mathematical formalisms to the empirical sciences in general, and

55
Lohmar 1989, 191f., cf. 30f.; cf. Tieszen 1989, 8f on Parsons and mathematical induction.
56
This is also the conclusion of Lohmar 1989, section II, 11 d; 193. Cf. l. c. 11a and b about
Husserl’s understanding of Hilbert’s normative ideal together with the footnotes referring to the
discussion of this question in the literature.
208 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

especially to the hard sciences. It has been mentioned above that phenomenology,
like mathematical Platonism, recognizes mathematical objects as ideal objects. It
has also been mentioned that a partial mathematical skepticism is not a necessary
implication for Platonists like Gödel. Husserl’s phenomenology shared with Frege’s
Platonism the rejection of psychologism. But phenomenology is, on the other hand,
not a “naïve” Platonism. It is not satisfied with the ontological thesis that there are
ideal objects, but is also interested in the additional question of the constitution,
the structure of the how of the givenness of different types of ideal objects for
consciousness.
The first steps in the analysis of the “how of the givenness of ideal objects” have
already to distinguish three types of ideal objects: morphological essences, exact
essences, and formal essences. The givenness of ideal objects in general presupposes
abstractions, and abstractions presuppose variations of contents in imagination.
Such variations are not “free,” but rule-guided. Morphological essences are given
guided by the pre-given categorial structures of things as concrete wholes of the
first and higher order, including their dependent and independent parts, foundation
relations between dependent parts, and relations between independent parts and
concrete wholes of the first order. As ideas in the Kantian sense exact essences are
given as correlates of mathematical idealizations, variations following the rules of a
progress and-so-on toward an ideal limit. The ideal limit is not given as a material
essence, but the beginning phases of the progress are still given in the material
spatial and temporal structures of the givenness of material things and manifolds
of material things in the lifeworld.
The givenness of formal essences presupposes formalizing abstraction. Formal-
izing abstraction presupposes variations of any material contents whatsoever within
the whole scope of one of the formal categorial structures mentioned above. Left in
the residuum of the abstraction are the categories and categorial structures given
in categorial intuition. The basic categories of formal ontology for any things
whatsoever are as, already mentioned, whole of the first and higher order, dependent
and independent part, foundation relation, and relation between pieces or concrete
wholes of the first-order, i.e., things. The basic mathematical categories are unit,
collection of units, and ordered collection and are formal categories of the highest
level of abstraction. Unit as a formal ontological category has the highest degree of
formal universality, the unity of Etwas überhaupt. As already mentioned, this Etwas
überhaupt does not only refer to some thing in general, which would restrict unity to
the unity concrete wholes, but it refers also the unity of all other formal ontological
categories, including dependent and independent parts, relations, collections of units
as units, etc.
What has been said about ideal objects can be applied to the problem of
pictorial representations, not only in mathematics but also in physics. Morpho-
logical essences are pictorial representations in the strict sense.57 Quasi-pictorial

57
Speaking of mathematical Platonism, it should be kept in mind that Plato’s Demiurge had to look
upon the ideas of animals and plants, morphological essences in terms of phenomenological formal
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 209

representations are geometrical drawings in the broadest sense indicating a begin-

ning phase in the progress and-so-on of mathematical idealizations, but not the
exact essence, the idea in the Kantian sense, itself. Formal essences, first of all
mathematical pure formal structures, admit only quasi-pictorial representations per
analogiam.
What has been said is sufficient as a preparation for some brief comments on the
postponed second aspect of Hopkin’s thesis, namely, that Husserl’s account of the
givenness of units and multitudes in algebraic formalizations of arithmetic is from
the beginning to the end (i.e., also in Formal and Transcendental Logic and Expe-
rience and Judgment) insufficient and presupposes an Aristotelian psychologism.
According to Klein, a satisfactory interpretation of algebraic formalizations and
symbolic numbers has been offered by Vieta.58 Following Vieta’s re-interpretation
of Neo-Platonic theories “symbolic59 numbers,” e.g., “the six” and not “six units,”
have to be understood as being of the species per se, i.e., as formations whose
merely possible objectivity is understood as actual objectivity. The merely potential
objectivity can be realized as an actual objectivity by the visible letter signs.60 The
variables of algebra have their substitution instances in such symbolic numbers and
not in the understanding of the authentic numbers given in the process of counting
in the Aristotelian tradition.
Turning to Husserl, it is first of all necessary to notice that the origins
of the technical terms used in Klein’s analysis of Vieta’s algebra are Neo-
Platonic re-interpretations of Aristotelian ontological concepts. Without denying
the significance of the Klein/Hopkins interpretation of the history of generative
foundations in the development of algebra, it is questionable whether they can be
accepted as satisfactory explications of what “variable,” “constant,” “operator,”
etc., mean in the context of the epistemological problems of formalized logic and
mathematics in the twentieth century and, hence, in the context of Husserlian
reflections on formalizations in formal logic and formal ontology has been
considered above. A discussion of the question whether Husserl’s analyses in
Formal and Transcendental Logic and Experience and Judgment are insufficient
will end in perhaps endless disputes about problems of interpretation because the
textual basis for interpretations is very small.61 What canbe said, however, is that the

ontology, before creating them. Ideas including ideas of plants and animals are also understood as
thoughts of God before the creation in the Neo-Platonic speculations of the church fathers. They
are of no interest for the Platonism of a mathesis universalis and mathematical and logical objects
in general.
58
Hopkins 2011, §§41, 173.
59
“Symbol” and “symbolic” in Vieta are, according to Klein, not terms that refer to variables
or constants of formalized languages. Instead, they rather refer to the substitution instances of
variables.
60
Hopkins 2011, §§136, 137, and §208.
61
One also has to keep in mind that the material published in EJ in general and especially in §§30
and 31 is a collection of manuscripts.
210 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

thesis that the substitution instances for variables in algebra are cardinal numbers
that must be understood as predicates of multitudes or sets is at least consistent with
what is said in Experience and Judgment about multitudes.
It is, hence, enough for the purposes of this systematic phenomenological
investigation to remember what has been said on number and measuring at the
beginning of this section. Even on the level of elementary first-order and second-
order understanding the activity of measuring already implies an abstraction from
the application of numbers in the process of counting things as concrete wholes.
Numbers refer to the sizes of collections of deliberately determined units of
extension space. The first step from the counting of things with “authentic” numbers
to the “potential” objectivity of symbolic numbers as predicates of multitudes was
already done on the level of elementary understanding before it was interpreted in
pre-scientific philosophical systems of higher understanding in Plato, Aristotle, and
Neo-Platonism.
The leading question of the last two sections was the problem of the application
of mathematical formalisms, especially in physics and in the hard sciences in
general, to the experience of the reality of the natural environment in the lifeworld.
A final answer to this question has to start with a summary of the main analyses
of Sect. 8.1. The natural sciences in general (including physics) presuppose the
first methodological abstraction. Experience is the touchstone of anything that can
be said about the reality of nature. The link that connects theoretical systems of
statements by the sciences with experience is experimental research, the checking
of hypotheses in experimental situations. Experimental checks presupposes precise
description and analysis of the phenomena, the observables that are relevant for
specific experimental situations.
The trust in experimental experience has its ultimate foundation in the interest
of elementary understanding in reliable predictions for the purposes of practical
life. The purpose of a reliable prediction is the elementary understanding of what
will happen after a practical action that adds a factor into the context of pre-
given circumstances in the natural environment. Reliable predictions on this level
already have the logical structure of conditionals and these conditionals can also
be used in explanations of what has happened. The first abstraction brackets the
practical interests and values of elementary understanding. What is left is the
theoretical interest in the discovery of causal relations and properties of materials
that are relevant for the discovery of causal relations in experimental research. This
foundation of the theoretical cognitive attitude of the sciences in the structures of
this experience in elementary understanding is the condition of the possibility of
the application of the results of the natural sciences in scientific technologies. More
about this turn “back to the roots” will be said in Sect. 9.2.
The second abstraction excludes all contents and structures given for elementary
understanding, and still given under the first reduction, that are not reducible
either to descriptions in terms of statements about the measurable properties of
the observables (the phenomena that are relevant in experimental situations) or to
theoretical systems of statements about predictions, hypotheses and explanations
with the aid of confirmed hypotheses that can be written in terms of well-formed
8.2 The Generation of Mathematical Formalisms, Their Application in the. . . 211

formulas of a mathematical formalism and can be derived from the principles of

this mathematical formalism. Vice versa mathematical formalisms are applicable
in the hard natural sciences only if they admit the derivation of theorems that can
be used as hypotheses and confirmed or disconfirmed in experimental situations. A
mathematical formalism, regardless of whether it is a classical formalism applied in
classical physics or a post-classical formalism applied in post-classical physics, is
of significance for reality and is real in this sense if and only if this is the case.
Two remarks have to be added. (1) It was and is in general desirable but not
necessary for the application of different mathematical formalisms to different
types of phenomena in physics to find a formalism of a higher order from which
the different formalisms are derivable. The formalism applied in classical physics
is derivable from relativity theory as a limit case. A formalism from which the
mathematical formalisms and quantum theory and relativity theory are derivable,
and that also admits the derivation of additional hypotheses that are testable in
experimental situations, is desirable but still lacking. It is not necessary for such
formalisms to be able to be represented in formalized axiom systems, let alone
axiom systems that are definite manifolds obeying Hilbert’s normative requirements
for the completeness of axiom systems.
(2) Though the application of mathematical formalisms is mandatory for the
hard sciences, not all mathematical formalisms have been applied in the hard
sciences, and some mathematical formalisms that have been applied in natural
sciences can even be applied in the human sciences, e.g., economics. This
problem will be considered in Sect. 10.5.
The first level of the foundation for the claim of physics to say something about
reality in experimental research ultimately has its foundation in the encounter with
the natural environment on the level of pre-scientific elementary understanding. In
other words, the ultimate foundation of scientific experience is the pre-scientific
experience of elementary understanding, and not the naked sensory experience of
the isolated subject of psychologistic empiricism. There is, hence, the additional
question whether and how far mathematical formalisms have a foundation in the
spatial and temporal structures of the experience of the natural environment in the
lifeworld. The phenomenological answer given above in the present section was
that such a link is possible with regard to the spatial-temporal framework and the
application of numbers in elementary understanding if and only if the immediate
objects of the mathematical formalism are mathematical idealizations, ideas in the
Kantian sense given in a progress of variations guided by the rule of the and-so-on
abstraction that has already its beginning segments in elementary understanding.
This is the case for classical physics or, what is approximately the same, as long
as the applied formalisms refer only to real numbers and to classical analytic
geometry. The classical mathematical formalism applied in classical physics
admits, therefore, quasi-pictorial representations of mathematical equations and
functions. This is no longer the case for formalisms that admit in addition the
application to non-Euclidean curved and/or n-dimensional spaces and/or beyond
the application of real numbers also the application of transcendent and imaginary
212 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

numbers as well. Pictorial representations in post-classical formalisms and their

applications in physics are only quasi-pictorial representations per analogiam of
formal mathematical relations in number-spaces.
Post-classical physics applied only a comparatively small selection of the
mathematical formalisms that were discovered decades before their application in
physics. Of significance for the application in special relativity theory is a four-
dimensional system of coordinates with the interpretation of the fourth dimension
as the dimension of time and the Lorentz transformation, the four-dimensional
counterpart of the Galileo transformation for a three-dimensional system. The
Lorentz transformation transforms a vector or vector system in a four-dimensional
system of coordinates (x0 , y0 , z0 , t0 ) into (x, y, z, t). General relativity theory adds
viewpoints taken from Riemann’s geometries with curvatures of space.
As mentioned above, mathematical formalisms with complex numbers have been
applied in mathematics for simplifications of trigonometric functions with complex
functions. Thus they have been, applicable in principle to all oscillating phenomena
that can be described in sine wave frequencies. In the beginning such mathematical
formalisms have been applied occasionally as simplifications in relativity theory, but
first of all for simplifications in the mathematical analysis of varying voltages and
currents in the physics of electromagnetic phenomena and electrical engineering
with the aid of the phasor calculus. Quantum theory applies such mathematical
formalism to vector spaces with infinitely many countable dimensions over the
field of complex numbers, the so-called Hilbert spaces. Such spaces have almost
nothing in common with three- or four-dimensional spaces or space-times and other
modifications of non-Euclidean geometries as long as a vector in such systems can
be analyzed with formal mathematical operations on real numbers. Such number-
spaces do at least have a last link that connects them with the classical spatial and
temporal dimensions of classical physics. But the application of this mathematical
formalism, together with the surprising behavior of the quantum phenomena that
can be analyzed with this formalism, causes serious difficulties for an attempt to
provide ontological interpretations of this application.

8.3 The Ontological Interpretation of Classical Physics

Natural science, first of all physics, tells us what reality is, and above all, what
and how nature really is. In terms of the phenomenological analysis of the
generative foundations of science in the lifeworld, it tells us what the reality given
in the immediate experience of the encounter of elementary understanding with
the natural environment when considered “in and by itself.” This claim of the
natural sciences, and especially the hard natural sciences, is the presupposition
for the additional claim that they provide a philosophy and with it an ontology
of nature based on mathematical principles. A phenomenological analysis of the
generative foundations of the natural sciences can provide a justification for this
claim, at least for classical physics and then for the difficulties of the attempt to
8.3 The Ontological Interpretation of Classical Physics 213

find a satisfactory ontological interpretation of post-classical physics, especially for

quantum theory. It will be shown below that the difference between the classical
mathematical formalisms that admit quasi-pictorial representations and the post-
classical mathematical formalisms that admit only quasi-pictorial representations
per analogiam is of central significance for these difficulties.
Science as a new philosophy of nature emerged in a pre-given context of higher
understanding in a cultural lifeworld. Some aspects of this context belong to the
necessary historical conditions, i.e., the generative foundations of the emergence
of science, but others are contingent. Metaphysics understood as general ontology
of being and beings can be applied in a philosophical onto-theology as a possible
extension of religions with an interest in a more or less rationally organized system
of religious dogmas. Apart from such onto-theological extensions, practical interest
in well-being and salvation is the main concern of religions. This interest, together
with all other practical interests of elementary and higher understanding is in
brackets for the theoretical attitude of the natural sciences. It is, however, also
already in brackets for a pre-scientific ontology of nature. A precise answer to
the question of possible ontological interpretations of the mathematical apparatus
of explanations in physics has to distinguish between pre-scientific ontologies of
nature62 and ontologies of nature in the context of philosophical systems that
presuppose epistemological reflections on already existing sciences.63
The relation between the natural sciences and religion as a system of dogma
is a practical psychological, political, and juridical problem in the first centuries
after the emergence of the natural sciences. How these problems have been handled
is a question of historical contingencies,64 but the transition from a pre-scientific
philosophical ontology of nature to the philosophy of nature of the sciences implies
necessary conditions. The emergence of the natural sciences is a perfect example for
the different aspects of a rejection and not an application of a literary tradition that
has been considered in Sect. 3.4. The rejected tradition is in this case the tradition of
the Aristotelian ontology of nature. Like rejections in general, this rejection has its
generative foundation in the pre-existence of a tradition of theoretical understanding
of nature just because it is its rejection and it is, like most rejections, a partial
rejection. It is partial because it applies, with significant modifications, a selection
of these basic ontological categories of the rejected philosophical tradition.
Elementary understanding is one of the generative foundations for the emergence
of classical physics, but the emergence of physics also requires generative founda-
tions on the level of higher understanding. It presupposes first of all a sufficiently

62
For instance, the ontology of nature of the Aristotelian tradition.
63
Ontologies of nature in modern philosophy since Descartes presuppose epistemological reflec-
tions on the natural sciences.
64
Scientists have been prosecuted, and executed, or have (like Descartes according to some of his
interpreters) tried to cover themselves by proving that their teachings are in accordance with the
teachings of the church. Others, e.g., Newton, have been convinced that science is in accordance
with the belief in the wisdom and providence of God.
214 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

developed theoretical interest in the categorial metaphysical structure of being in

general, and especially in the categorial structure of nature. Secondly, it presupposes
a sufficiently developed system of mathematical knowledge.
It is a historical contingency that the Aristotelian tradition was the dominant
theoretical philosophy at the time of the emergence of the natural sciences,
and it is also a historical contingency that another philosophical ontology, the
atomism of Democritus and the Epicureans, was again available in the Renaissance.
Nevertheless, basic structures of the Aristotelian and the Democritean ontologies of
nature have been of significance for the generative foundations of the emergence of
the natural sciences in the European cultural tradition.
A phenomenological analysis of the generative foundations for the possible
emergence of the hard natural sciences must, therefore, begin with a short survey
of the basic categories of the Aristotelian and the Democritean tradition and their
roots in the lived experience of elementary understanding. These roots indicate
why and how these ontological philosophical categories could be and have been
applied in the natural sciences. It was certainly not the main intention of Aristotle
and the medieval Aristotelians to understand the categories of their ontological
theories as categories of the structure of the experience of the natural environment
in elementary understanding, but many of Aristotle’s examples indicate that the
concrete lived experience of elementary understanding is indeed the empirical basis
of the process of the generalizing abstractions in which the highest genera, the
Aristotelian system of ontological categories, are given.
The raw material discovered in the natural environment is the Aristotelian matter,
and if this is used and shaped in the process of the realization of certain purposes of
elementary understanding, it is the material cause of what has been realized. Means
used in forming the matter according to the intentions guided by the final causes
are the efficient or moving causes. On the level of elementary understanding the art
of the application of moving causes is the mechanical art, the mēchanikē technē65
as the art of producing and using instruments, i.e., tools, and machines in the crafts.
Efficient causes are in most cases local causes. Living organisms in particular but
also human artifacts in the broadest sense have their generation in the realization of
a form in already formed matter of a lower level, and can suffer degeneration and
finally corruption of the unity of form and matter.
The cause that determines the generation is the formal cause. The driving force
behind decisions to act in order to achieve certain goals is the final cause. Final
causes are also behind the striving of certain beings to their “natural place” or
their being attracted by other beings. Final causes are non-local causes. Causes
determine the course of events and states of affairs in nature, however, it was
generally acknowledged that the course of celestial bodies is determined, while the
course of events “under the moon” is only partially determined. What happens can
also happen by chance and is, hence, partially not determined.

65
The meaning of mēchanē in ancient Greek includes the meaning of tool and also of machine used
as a mechnical tool or device.
8.3 The Ontological Interpretation of Classical Physics 215

It is a historical contingency for the emergence of the sciences that the first
moving final and formal cause was understood as God in the monotheistic Jewish
and Christian onto-theology, e.g., in Thomas of Aquinas. The formal cause and
form is understood as belonging to the “ideas of divine reason before the creation.”
The formal cause is in this context reduced to the final cause. The naturalistic
Aristotelian interpretation of the Averroistic tradition in the medical faculties of the
European tradition was different. The final cause was understood as the final phase
of the actualization of a form in matter and was reduced to the formal cause.
Even in the interpretation of the Averroists the Aristotelian tradition, was
partially incompatible with the categories used in the theories of the natural sciences.
(1) The final cause given as the force behind decisions to act in lived experience
is excluded after the first reductive abstraction to the observables of intersensory
experience. It is excluded because it is given only in subjective lived experience. (2)
The formal cause can be tolerated as a heuristic principle in the life sciences if it
is understood as an independent causal category and not as a correlate of the final
cause. The formal cause is, however, not of interest for the hard sciences. The formal
principles of the hard sciences are mathematical formalisms. (3) Some Averroistic
naturalists, but also the Franciscans in the tradition of Duns Scotus, had an interest
in observations and crude experiments in the late Middle Ages. Experience was
recognized as a source of knowledge in the Aristotelian tradition, but there were no
methodological reflections on experiments or on the nature of the empirical basis of
intersensory observations.
Nothing can be said about formless matter by itself in the Aristotelian tradition
because formless matter has as such no qualities and no relations to anything else.
It is a historical contingency for the emergence of the natural sciences that the
philosophical ontology of nature of Democritus and Epicurus was not acceptable
for the onto-theological mainstream metaphysics in the Middle Ages.66 It is also a
historical contingency that their ontology was re-discovered and of interest again in
the Renaissance. Of significance is that the basic categories of the Democritean
ontology can be understood as counterparts of the basic categories of classical
physics. What exists has to be understood as the product of mechanical efficient
causality determined by the movement and the shape of the atoms in empty space.
This philosophical theory has prima facie a striking similarity with the ontology
of classical physics and was of specific interest for the philosophers of the
Renaissance, but it is still a philosophical ontological theory. There are arguments
against and arguments for the theory. There is no deductive system of mechanics
guided by mathematical principles determining the selection and definition of the
categorial system of the theory, and there was no attempt to derive predictions from
the basic principles of the system and to test them in experiments.

66
Quite apart from the unacceptable ethics of the Epicureans, their philosophy of nature and
their ontology was incompatible with all attempts to develop a monotheistic onto-theology in the
religious tradition of the Middle Ages.
216 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

The generation of theories in the hard sciences presupposes mathematical

theories for their explanations of empirical phenomena. Pre-scientific ontological
categories are acceptable if and only if they can be understood within the scope and
the limits of interpretations of mathematical principles. Together with a selection
of modified categories from the pre-scientific ontology of nature the mathematical
principles determine the “a priori” of the region of intersensory experience that
can be recognized as the region of objects of classical physics after the second
abstraction. Thus the extensions and modifications of the mathematical principles
of classical physics that emerged in the later development of the mathematical
formalism applied in post-classical physics have significant consequences for the
ontological interpretation of the mathematical formalisms of post-classical physics.
Classical physics is the generative foundation of post-classical physics. It is,
therefore, advisable to consider the problems of a phenomenological epistemology
of classical physics before turning to post-classical physics.
The basic categories of classical physics are infinite space, infinite time, bodies
given in empty time and space, movement, acceleration, force, and energy. A math-
ematical treatment of these categories presupposes the possibility of measuring. The
basic presupposition for the measuring and then the mathematical treatment of the
categories of shape, mass, movement, acceleration, force, and causality is measuring
space and measuring time. This was already known in systems of pre-scientific
philosophical physics. It was, in addition, a “disputed question” of pre-scientific
philosophical physics whether the world was limited or eternal in time and limited
or without limits in space.
A short digression might be helpful for the understanding of time and space
as categories of classical physics. To call them categories sounds odd from the
viewpoint of Kantianism where space and time are forms of intuition and the
a priori of sensibility. In a phenomenological context, however, space and time
as forms of “sensibility” are the form of the structure of the givenness of the
hyletic field in primordial passive synthesis, and on the level of active synthesis
and intersubjectivity they are the forms of the structure of objects given in the
lifeworld in intersensory experience. Space and time as abstract moments of the
structure of experience of reality on the primordial and the intersubjective level are
the generative foundation for the idealizing abstractions in which space and time are
given as ideal objects in pre-scientific philosophical ontologies, and beyond that on
the higher level of idealizing abstraction in classical physics. For phenomenology,
the problem of the Kantian forms of intuition is that these forms imply an
interpretation of space and time that presupposes the mathematical idealizations.
Kant’s forms of intuition are not the forms of the spatial and temporal structure
of sensory experience in the lifeworld. They are already mathematically formed
concepts of space and time, and in this sense they are categories applied in the
ontology of classical physics.
The structure of the experience of real space on the level of primordial lived
experience has its foundation in the separation of the inner and the outer of the
8.3 The Ontological Interpretation of Classical Physics 217

living body.67 The center of lived space is the Here of the living body and the
manifold Theres of other bodies outside the living body. Even on the primordial
level this space already has the general structure of above and below, to the right
and left, in front and behind one’s own living body. In this sense, it is a quasi three-
dimensional space. The There can become a Here in kinaesthetic movements, and
beyond that in the givenness of other living bodies. Intersubjective space is given
with the recognition of actual and potential other living bodies in places in space
outside the one’s own living body. One own living body can reach the place outside
of the other living body only in time consuming kinaesthetic movements in the
future and it is actually present only in the recognition of actual or potential Others
in the present Now of intersubjective experience.
Intersubjectively given space can be measured. Measurement presupposes fixed
standards of measuring rods, ideal units for measuring distances between bodies
as well as the volumes of bodies in the outside of the manifold in the There.
Measuring presupposes standards of measuring, units of measure. Standardized
units of measure are supposed to be equal. The determination of ideally equal units
of measure presupposes the same cogitative types of variations and abstractions as
those in which individual units as exact mathematical essences are presupposed in
counting. But it also shares the type of idealizing abstraction that was required for
the constitution of the exact essences of geometry. For elementary understanding
“geometry” was, as already mentioned, originally the term for “measuring the
land.” Measuring as an activity of elementary understanding, is the medium of the
synthesis of the mathematical idealizations presupposed in elementary geometry
and in elementary arithmetic.
The first abstraction that is constitutive for the cognitive attitude of the natural
sciences has been characterized in the preceding sections as having its foundation in
the practical interest in predictions and causal relations of elementary understand-
ing. But natural science is interested in predictions and theoretical explanations
as such and not because of their applicability for practical purposes. The second
abstraction has its generative foundation in the first reduction’s theoretical interest
in causal relations, but it reduces in addition the scope of the descriptions of observ-
ables given in experimental situations to measurable phenomena or phenomena that
can be reduced to measurable phenomena with the aid of mathematical formalisms.
It is, in this sense, an abstractive reduction.
The structure of the infinite space of classical physics can still be represented as
the intentional object of this type of idealizing abstractions if
(1) the Here of the primordial experience is represented as the ideal limit, the zero
point, in which the three dimensions of above-below, before-behind, and right-
left intersect and

67
What follows is a summary of what has already been considered in Sect. 3.1. On lived space, cf.
also Ströker 1965, part I.
218 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

(2) the angles of which their crossing are understood (again on the level of exact
essences) as right angle, while in addition
(3) the distances in all on the three dimensions of parameters can be determined as
measurable; then
(4) given a sufficiently developed geometry, arithmetic, algebra, and measurement
techniques, each point in this system the coordinates can be mathematically
determined in terms of measured distances from the zero-point, the standing
“Here” in the system of the coordinates.
(5) The final step for the constitution of the subjectively and intersubjectively
independent category of space in classical physics is the Galileo transformation.
The future horizon of lived experience is the temporal horizon of primordial
expectations that can be fulfilled or disappointed. The future horizon on the level
of intersubjective experience is comprised of explicit expectations, predictions that
can be fulfilled if they are intersubjectively confirmed or disappointed when the
prediction turns out to be false. The future is, hence, an open and not yet determined
realm of possible events that may or may not happen and not an already determined
one-dimensional sequence of events. The past is the horizon of the “flowing off”
of events happening in the present and sinking into the past, the continuum of
retentions as the realm of associatively structured memories, and beyond that of
explicit reproductions of sequences of completely determined events that can no
longer be changed. The future is beset with expectations determined by the past,
but since expectations can be disappointed, the future is also given as an open
horizon of the present for new desired or undesirable contents and events. Future
and past are, hence, radically different dimensions in the structure of the experience
of temporality in the actual Now of the lifeworld.
The universal historical time given as objective time in the lifeworld is already
an abstraction that has its foundation in the structure of the time of lived experience.
For any deliberately chosen reproduced event in a past present, this past present
has its own past as a completely determined one-dimensional indefinite ordered
sequence of events or facts. It also has an already determined sequence of events
in the temporal dimension of its past future horizon. Every actual Now will flow off
into the past and will be given as an object in oblique intention for subjective and
intersubjective experience. If the Now is given as an object it is, therefore, given as
the center of an-open ended one-dimensional order of future and past events. The
foundation for the representation of time as a continuum that is indefinitely open in
the directions of the past and the future of a deliberately chosen Now is, hence, the
experience that an actual Now will always flow off into the past and will itself be a
past Now.
The “disputed question” of philosophical ontological and onto-theological theo-
ries of time was and is the question whether time is limited or indefinitely open in
the future and in the past horizon of lived experience. It was the question whether the
world was created and will have an end depending on the will of God, or whether the
world is eternal and infinite in space, a self-sustaining entity with a world-immanent
prime mover or a world soul according to some enthusiastic philosophers of the
Renaissance like Giordano Bruno.
8.3 The Ontological Interpretation of Classical Physics 219

The intersubjectively pre-given continuum of the historical time of events by

itself is not measurable. Time is measurable only if it can be projected on movements
of bodies in space, first of all the regular circular movements of the celestial bodies
in the natural environment, and then, on the level of a further developed elementary
understanding, on movements of the pendulum in clocks. Measuring space is the
presupposition of the measurement of time.
What can be immediately measured are the shapes and volumes of bodies in
space and the movement and the acceleration of the movement of bodies in space
and time. Mass, originally given as weight in intersensory experience, can already
be measured as weight in elementary understanding with pairs of scales and other
more sophisticated devices. Force can be determined in an equation as a correlate
of the measured quantities of mass and acceleration. This equation is essential
for the explication of the idealized68 category of causality in classical physics.
The energy of a body can be determined in equations in a system of mutually
interacting bodies in space and time. Measured force and energy as categories of
classical physics determine and define the “efficiency” of the “moving” causes of
pre-scientific ontology in the context of classical physics.
Causes and the forces behind them can be local, like mechanical causes, or
non-local, like gravitational forces. The causal relations between bodies in motion
changing the speed and direction of other bodies are reciprocal causal relations that
can be defined in terms of mathematical equations. Cause and effect are, therefore,
both determined without exception by the same set of ontological categories. In
other words, the entities that function as agens and those that are the patiens belong
to the same kind of beings, the beings that can be given in the thematic attitude of
physics in the residuum of the second abstraction.
A mechanical and/or gravitational system of forces between two mass points
determining the speed of their motion in a system of coordinates can be mathe-
matically represented and calculated as a system of vectors in a three-dimensional
system of coordinates x, y, z. It can be shown with the aid of the Galileo
transformation that the laws of Newtonian mechanics for such inertial systems are
invariant for another system of coordinates x0 , y0 , z0 and a relative constant speed v
parallel to the x-axis.
The purpose of this rough sketch of relevant points for a future phenomenological
analysis of classical physics is to demonstrate that the basic structures of the
ontology of classical physics can still be understood as idealizing abstractions. The
mathematical theories determining the principles of classical physics as ontology
of nature presuppose only idealizing mathematical abstractions without admixtures
that can only be justified in the framework of strict mathematical formalisms

68
Cf. Hua VI, §9d, though nothing is said to explicate what “idealized” means in this context; see
Ströker 1997, ch. VII, and Harvey 1989, 197 ff., who offers a thorough analysis of the complex
background of the mathematical idealizations and their application to the basic categories of
classical physics.
220 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

presupposing formalizing abstractions. The ontology of classical physics is in this

sense still a “natural” ontology.69
Four remarks that are of phenomenological interest for the following investi-
gations have to be added. The first, the second, and the third are of significance
for the discussion of the ontological problems of post-classical physics. The last
is of significance for the ontological relevance of physics for the explanation of
phenomena that are in brackets for the second abstractive reduction and beyond
that for the critical phenomenological evaluation of the meta-physical ontology of a
reductive naturalism.
(1) The laws of Newtonian mechanics for inertial systems are invariant for Galileo
transformations, but Newton’s theory of relativity already shows that in a closed
inertial system, it is impossible to determine whether this system as in rest or
is moving moves with constant speed relative to its surrounding systems. It is,
however, possible to determine accelerations of the “box” caused by external
gravitational forces.
(2) Forces determining cause-effect relations in the context of Cartesian mechanics
are forces behind local cause and effect relations. Newton’s law of gravitation
is a causal law for non-local cause-effect relations. The forces behind the
causation are forces that act at a distance. Elementary understanding recognizes
both local and non-local causes. The experience of weight is already an
outstanding necessary part of the structure of lived experience on the level
of animalic understanding of one’s own living body and its relation to the
surrounding bodies, and then in elementary understanding as well. There is
also no immediate impact of a local force outside bodies that causes them to
fall down to earth if no local cause outside them prevents them from falling
down to earth.70
There are, hence, no reasons, seen either from the viewpoint of elementary
understanding or from the viewpoint of a pre-scientific philosophy of nature, to
reject non-local forces in physics. Nevertheless, there were some doubts about and
even outright opposition to this extension of physics in the seventeenth century. The
motive behind such doubts is historically contingent. The main reason supporting
the opposition against non-local forces was that such an assumption could be used
as an argument for astrology and other superstitious beliefs.
(3) Elementary understanding is only interested in the question whether or not
the application of simple causal relations works. The question whether or
not everything in nature is determined by causal laws is not of interest. The

69
The Newtonian dictum that space is the sensorium of God indicates the empirical basis for this
analogy in the structure of the lifeworld.
70
Non-local causes are also recognized elsewhere in systems of higher understanding, first of all in
religions. There are divine miracles; there is the assumption of powers of demons and magicians
acting at a distance; and there is, last not least, astrology. Such non-local forces are in most cases
final causes.
8.3 The Ontological Interpretation of Classical Physics 221

question is only meaningful for the thematic attitude of science after the first
and especially after the second abstraction. Except for efficient causality, the
problem of determinism/indeterminism was already a problem of pre-scientific
ontology of nature. The movement of celestial bodies is obviously governed by
strict laws. Things under the moon are not strictly determined. Humans living
under the moon do not know whether or not they can reach their goals. Their
decisions and their actions are not able to determine the future course of events.
The goddess Fortuna or the blind Fates govern human actions. The problem of
determinism/indeterminism was, however, a serious onto-theological problem
for monotheistic religions. The question is whether or not everything that what
happens is pre-determined and under the predestination of divine providence
and power.71
Prima facie there is no place left for causal indeterminacy in classical physics.
The general thesis following Laplace on probabilities is that a perfect intelligence,
not the human intelligence, is able to predict all causally determined events in the
universe. The future as well as the past will be open to its vision. Newton’s position
was similar, but he admitted that the will of God can cause irregular changes in the
solar system.72 It is obvious that the old onto-theological thought patterns are still
of significance for Newton and Laplace. Kant’s position is different. In his Critique
the law of causality is a principle of understanding that guides scientific as well as
pre-scientific investigations. It is a regulative principle of experience and not a law
governing things in themselves. There might be transcendental freedom, the power
of starting a new causal sequence of events without being caused from elsewhere,
for noumena.73 Assuming that physics is a science about the things in themselves
behind the appearances, it is possible to offer a “physicalistic” translation of Kant’s
thesis: the principles of explanation of classical physics imply, as a rule of research,
recognizing of only deterministic causality. It is, however, possible that there are
phenomena in experimental situations in quantum theory that seem to indicate that
the “things in themselves” that can be discovered in physics do admit indeterminacy
in some cases. This problem will be considered in the next section.
(4) The categories of the ontology of classical physics have been called primary
“qualities.” Seen from the viewpoint of the old Aristotelian list of categories,
such primary qualities are quantifiable qualities and belong, therefore, in this
respect to the category of quantity. Seen from the viewpoint of a phenomeno-
logical epistemology, such primary “qualities” are the “qualities” that belong to
the residuum of the second abstraction. They admit a strict explication of their
meaning in terms of mathematical principles.

71
The question is, first of all, whether God or not has left some room for the human will to sin.
72
Cushing 1994, 11.3.1.
73
Kant KGS III, B 561 f, Transcendental Dialectic, ch. II “The antinomy of pure reason”
section 9, III.
222 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

Secondary qualities (colors, sounds, smells, touch, and bodily feelings) belong to
the residuum of the empirical basis of the first abstraction but not to the residuum of
the second abstraction. The ontological thesis of classical physics is that secondary
qualities are appearances that are “caused” and can be explained with the aid of
properties of primary qualities as qualities of substances that can be considered
as the “real” things in themselves. There is sufficient experimental evidence for
this explanation, but there is also an epistemological problem. The question is what
“causation” and “explanation” mean in this case. The relation between primary and
secondary qualities cannot be reduced to mathematically explicable causal relations.
Such causal relations between entities are restricted to primary qualities. They are
reciprocal and can be expressed in mathematical equations.
The thesis that primary qualities cause the secondary qualities refers, on the
contrary, to a one-sided necessary and sufficient causation. Cause and effect belong
to different ontological categories. Assuming the phenomenological analysis of
the abstractions that are constitutive for the natural sciences, the thesis implies
that phenomena given in the residuum of the second reduction are able to explain
phenomena given in the residuum of the first abstraction but not in the residuum of
the second reduction. What is given in the residuum of the first abstraction can be
reduced to phenomena of the second abstraction. The second abstraction is, hence,
an abstractive reduction.

8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations

of the Mathematical Formalisms in Post-Classical Physics

An analysis of the difficulties with the ontological interpretation of the application

of mathematical formalisms to phenomena given in experimental situations that
do not occur in classical physics but are relevant for the epistemology of post-
classical physics has to start with a brief explication of the general structures of
such difficulties. The next step is then a survey of the different types of difficulties
in different fields of post-classical physics before turning to a phenomenological
analysis of the difficulties.
According to what has been said in the preceding section, there are no serious
problems in principle for the ontological interpretation of the theoretical entities of
classical mathematical formalism in classical physics.74 The theoretical entities of
classical physics are interpretable as mathematical idealizations that admit quasi-
pictorial representations in the spatial structures of intersensory experience. Hence
in their application of their ideal mathematical objects to phenomena given in
experience, they admit ontological interpretations that are immediately applicable

74
E.g., the Cartesian ontology of res extensa and the Kantian transcendental ontology of the objects
of experience with the aid of the principles of pure understanding and, first of all, the axioms of
intuition.
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations of the Mathematical. . . 223

to real objects given in intersensory experience. The situation will turn out to be
different in post-classical physics, first of all because the theories do admit only
analogies of quasi-pictorial representations and secondly because it may even be
the case that an adequate description of the phenomena in terms of well-formed
formulas of the applied mathematical formalism are already incompatible with
quasi-pictorial representations.
The assumption of classical physics that waves as movements of particles in
electromagnetic fields and optical experimental phenomena obey the laws for
inertial phenomena presupposes a fluid matter, the ether that fills empty space,
but there is no experimental evidence for the ether hypothesis. The solution for
this problem in post-classical physics is Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
Simultaneity of spatially separated events cannot be given in immediate perceptual
observation. Co-temporality needs, hence, a definition reducing simultaneity to
immediate results of measuring. The reduction presupposes the assumption of the
constant speed of light in empty space together with the derivable theorem of the
addition of speeds for relative speeds and the Lorentz transformation.
The application of the Lorentz transformation of relativity theory in physics is
not, like the application of the Galileo transformation, a transformation of inertial
systems in a three-dimensional system of coordinates. It is a transformation of
inertial systems in a four dimensional continuum (x, y, z, t) to another inertial system
in (x0 , y0 , z0 , t0 ). The consequence of the assumption that the coordinates referring to
time t and t0 can be different is the relativity of co-simultaneity. Events that are seen
from the viewpoint of one inertial system as simultaneous are not simultaneous for
others.
The main consequences are (1) the Lorentz contraction: the extension of a moved
body is smaller in the direction of its movement than the extension of the body for
an observer who shares the movement of the body; and (2) the Einstein dilatation of
time: the progress of a clock is faster for an observer who shares the movement of
an inertial system than the progress of a clock for an observer outside the system.
Finally, (3) the mass of a resting body is smaller then than the mass of the same
body in movement. Energy is defined as equal to the product of mass and the square
of the speed of light. Events in the four-dimensional “world” as the totality of events
are, according to Minkowski, “world points.”
The transition from the special to the general theory of relativity presupposes in
addition the curvature of space.75 Given this presupposition and the context of the
four-dimensional “world” and its “world points,” cause-effect relations are local,
and this implies that what appears as the non-local causal laws of gravitation in
classical physics have to be understood as local cause-effect relations in the context
of this mathematical formalism. However, the formal system preserves a strictly
deterministic interpretation of causality.
The mathematical formalism used for explanations in the special theory of
relativity has the advantage of a simple theory of higher universality that covers

75
Cf. §30 above about Riemann spaces.
224 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

the experimental evidence for optical and electromagnetic phenomena, rejects the
ether hypothesis, covers inertial phenomena, and preserves the theorems of classical
physics as approximately true for comparatively small velocities of the movement
of bodies in comparatively small time-space systems, for instance our galaxy and
a little bit beyond. There is sufficient evidence provided by observations and
experiments for the theory in astrophysics, and there were no objections against its
application in nuclear physics before the second decade of the twentieth century.76
The mathematical principles of the philosophy of nature of classical physics had
its generative foundation in mathematical idealizations given in rule-governed eide-
tic variations of quantitative phenomena in the lifeworld. Formalizing abstraction
excludes the intuitive background. The transition to a four-dimensional continuum
is prima facie a comparatively small step on the level of formalizing abstraction
in mathematics. Going back to what has been said above about the transition
from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometries, such transitions require more than
certain modifications of some principles of Euclidean geometry. Only analogues
of “pictorial” representations in the non-Euclidean geometries in four- and more-
dimensional continua, with and without curvatures, can be given in intersensorially
accessible geometrical constructions of figures in three-dimensional space. What
can be said about such continua must be said in terms of a formalistic extension of
analytic geometry without quasi-pictorial representations.
The mathematical formalism of relativity theory can prove its mettle because it
can be applied in explanations of experimental phenomena given in intersensory
experience, but an ontological interpretation of the formalism behind the explana-
tions has no generative foundation in the lifeworld. The “world” and the “world
points” of an Einstein/Minkowski world are “entities” on the level of the ideal
objects of formalizing abstraction. They are “things in themselves” behind their
appearances in the space-time system of classical physics. The re-definition of the
basic categories of physics in terms of this formalism is incompatible with the
structure of the experience of body, weight/mass, movement, acceleration, force,
energy and causality defined in terms of these categories. The non-local forces
behind causations in the lifeworld and in the world of classical physics are local
causations in a four-dimensional “world.”
Seen from the viewpoint of the defenders of Cartesian mechanics against New-
ton’s laws of gravitation, that sounds good, but there is no ontological interpretation
of “local” and “non-local” for “world points” in the Einstein/Minkowski “world”
that can be traced back to the lived experience of the locality and non-locality of
causes given in the lifeworld for intersensory experience. What can be said is that
what appears as a non-local force for comparatively small distances in the world
of classical physics and in the lifeworld are “really” local forces in the world of
relativity theory.

76
Cf. below about von Neumann’s proof that the application of hidden variables in the context of
relativity theory is incompatible with the mathematical formalism of quantum theory.
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations of the Mathematical. . . 225

Seen from the point of view of the history of philosophy, another question is what
it would really mean if we were to assume that the astronomical observation now
of what has happened in a distant past shortly after the “absolute beginning” called
the “big bang” refers to a possible pictorial or quasi-pictorial representation of that
“bang.” Such an assumption is a pain in the neck of the intellect comparable with
the pain in the neck of a Scholastic intellect that was confronted with the assumption
that God created the world in time and space and not before and outside of time and
space.
The mathematical formalism applied in quantum mechanics is a Hilbert space.
Hilbert spaces are number-spaces for complex numbers and have denumerably
infinitely many dimensions. Their state vectors for quantum systems are of unit
length or zero length and are determined by complex numbers. Hilbert spaces
are spaces of state vectors, and not of locations in a space. State vectors can be
represented by the sum of orthogonal state vectors. They are not restricted to three
dimensions and can be multiplied by complex numbers. An immediate application
of this formalism to the measurements of experimental situations is not possible,
because it implies complex numbers. A special operator, the Hermetian operator,
is required to represent vectors in a Hilbert space as vectors in the phenomena
of experimental situations given in “real” space, i.e., with values that are real
numbers with a linear ordering and, therefore, able to be values of observables in
experimental situations.77
The mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics is able to explain all relevant
experimental phenomena and to derive all empirically relevant hypotheses. The
problem of quantum theory is that the whole context of mathematical formalism, the
explanations of empirical evidences with the aid of this formalism, and the empirical
phenomena considered by themselves, admit different ontological interpretations.
It is, furthermore, of significance that these interpretations require more than a
selection and re-interpretation of the ontological categories of classical physics or
even of relativity theory. The categories of classical physics immediately refer to
“real” being and beings in direct intention, and in this respect they share the naïve
realistic attitude of pre-scientific ontologies. Interpretations of quantum theory have
to add reflections on categories in oblique intention and these additionally imply
epistemological viewpoints. More will be said below. Some of the interpretations
have shortcomings, but two of them, the anti-realistic Copenhagen interpretation
and the realistic Bohm interpretation, cover the ground.78
The main reason for the epistemological problems is the application of math-
ematical statistics for the explanations of experimental phenomena in quantum
mechanics. This has nothing in common with the type of statistical causality,
the measurable degrees of probability of causal connections, on the level of the
first methodological abstraction. There are, in addition, significant differences
between the application of statistical mechanics in classical physics and in quantum

77
For a precise explication, see Gibbins 1987, 89–92.
78
More precisely, this was at least the state of the art in the last decade of the last century.
226 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

mechanics. Probability in classical physics is defined as relative frequency in an

ensemble. Pre-given are observable causal interdependencies between the changes
in observable phenomena of ensembles in experimental situations.79 All the initial
conditions are known in such experiments and identical measurement results are
given in repetitions of the experiments.
Particles moving in a system of particles in classical physics have, each taken
by itself, a determinate position and momentum at any given time. The laws of
force of mechanics determining the movement and the position of the particles can
be calculated if the number of the particles is a small system of particles. Given
this a priori background it is possible to explain the properties of the ensemble.
The situation is different in the case of quantum theory. There is no possibility
of explaining the frequency phenomena with the aid of a theory that has been
confirmed by independent experimental evidences and is able to determine the
position and the momentum of individual particles in the ensemble.
Reflections on the so-called logic of quantum mechanics are not able to solve
this problem. The Hilbert space applied in quantum mechanics is a highly abstract
object, but the logic of the mathematical formalism applied in quantum theory is
classical; the mathematical calculation of frequencies and probabilities applied in
quantum mechanics are also classical. Here the term “classical” means that the
mathematical formalisms applied in quantum mechanics are formalisms within the
limits of classical logic, not a post-classical modal logic.
The problem is that the logic of statements in descriptions of the observables of
experimental situations in quantum experiments is not classical. A basic statement
of the elementary language of quantum mechanics is of the form: the value of the
dynamic variable d for the system S at a time t lies in range D. The lattice of closed
subspaces in a two-dimensional Hilbert space for conjunction and disjunction is,
however, non-distributive.80 It is sufficient for the leading intention of this section
to highlight the logical properties of the language.81 The value for the f, f—case of
“P v Q” is “?.” “?” means “uncertain,” and the value for the t, f—case of “– P” is
also?. There are, correspondingly, restrictions on the rules for conditional proof, the
v-elimination, and double negation.82
It is more than questionable whether a non-classical modal-logical representation
of the strange features of the observational language of quantum mechanics is able
to solve the problems of its ontological interpretation. Prima facie the value “?”
says something about the “uncertainty” of statistical probabilities. An answer has to

79
For instance the causal relation between the temperature and pressure in the kinetic theory of
gases.
80
Gibbins 1987, 92 f: (A & B) v (A & C) implies logically A & (B v C) but not vice versa.
81
For a detailed account of the background in the descriptions of the relevant phenomena in
quantum mechanics and of the basic statements of quantum mechanics “bottom up,” cf. Gibbins
1987, part II, sections 6 and 11; cf. 146.
82
Cf. Gibbins 1987, 134f. He mentions in addition some logical truths of classical logic that turn
out not to be valid in quantum logic.
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations of the Mathematical. . . 227

keep in mind that a complete quantum logical account of quantum mechanics has to
develop a complete account of a mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics
that is able to replace the classical mathematical formalism applied in quantum
logic. This would imply a meta-logical possible world semantics for quantum logics.
The attempt to apply it to the ontological problems of quantum theory leads to
absurdities.
Quantum logic is, hence, nothing more and nothing less than a re-formulation of
the ontological problems on the level of a formalized modal logic, and not a solution
for the problems.83 The approach of physics to the problems of the logic of the
elementary language of the basic statements of quantum mechanics is bottom up; in
contrast quantum logic is a top-down view of the problems of quantum mechanics,
and it might even encourage some ontological theses that can be and have been
challenged with good reasons from other positions.84
Quantum theory is restricted to ensembles and is not able to say anything about
individual quantum systems, but it is possible for an ontological interpretation to
assume such hidden variables that determine individual quantum systems behind the
frequency phenomena of quantum ensembles. Einstein introduced the first version
of the hidden variables. Einstein’s assumption of hidden variables presupposes the
special theory of relativity and implies, therefore, both indeterminacy relations
and the rejection of non-local instantaneous action at a distance. The objections
have some weight because the theory of special relativity seemed to be applicable
to subatomic and electromagnetic phenomena in the old quantum theory before
1925.85
The problem of Einstein’s position is not only that there was and is no
experimental evidence for such hidden variables. Presupposing the mathematical
formalism of Hilbert spaces and the Hermetian operator, it has been shown that no
state of a quantum system can assign simultaneously definite values to all quantum
mechanical observables.86 The assumption of hidden variables can only be saved for
a non-relativistic space and time background, with the additional assumption that the
values of hidden variables depend in addition on the measurement apparatus.87
The main motive behind the temptation to assume hidden variables is the
assumption that quantum mechanics is incomplete without hidden variables. The
first problem of assuming the completeness of quantum mechanics is that quantum
systems can be interpreted as systems of particles and as system of waves.88 There
are mathematical problems and serious experimental counter-evidences for the
assumption that reality is wavelike and the frequency associated with the system is

83
Gibbins 1987, 144.
84
Gibbins 1987, 166.
85
Cf. Gibbins l987, 8ff., on Einstein.
86
Cf. Gibbins 1987, 122f., on von Neumann and others.
87
Cf. Cushing 1994, 42ff., on Bohm; more on the Bohm interpretation will be said below.
88
For detailed descriptions of the two-slit experiment see Gibbins 1987, 36f., 41, 147–51.
228 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

the frequency of the wave function. The particle theory also has shortcomings. The
basic problem for the particle theory is that this theory has to presuppose guiding
fields but what the field is and how it guides remains unexplained.89
The second problem is the interpretation of the statistical frequencies of the
individual quantum systems. The thesis that statistical frequencies are properties of
the quantum systems themselves is a necessary implication of the assumption that
quantum theory is complete.90 Uncertainty is the principle of quantum systems, and
indeterminacy relations are the ontological correlate of the uncertainty principle.
The indeterminacy is an indeterminacy of position and momentum. Probability
refers not to the course of events in time, but to the tendency of events. Position
and momentum cannot be observed simultaneously, according to a proposal of
Heisenberg, because they are disturbed by the interaction with the instrument that
is used for simultaneously observing the position and momentum of the quantum
system.91
The guiding thread for the ontological interpretations of quantum theory in the
Copenhagen interpretation was to start with an explication of the categorial system
of classical physics in order to show the limits of this system. The indeterminacy
principle and the wave/particle dualism are the indicators of the shortcomings
of this categorial system. The observer and the observed belong to one and the
same context. The quantum system and the measurement instruments, including
the observer, are not independent entities, subject and object are inseparable.
It is necessary to recognize the limits of our knowledge, our representing the
world as it is in itself. To understand the indeterminacy principle (as well as
the complementarity principle) as a realistic ontological description of reality in
itself is absurd. The indeterminacy principle and the complementary principle are
indicators of the limits of our knowledge. The Copenhagen interpretation has been
characterized in the literature as anti-realistic, as metaphysics, and it has even been
said that it is a type of positivism because it rejects all attempts to introduce hidden
entities behind the phenomena.92
It has been mentioned that the assumption of hidden variables can be saved for
a non-relativistic space-time framework with additional assumptions. Schrödinger’s
non-relativistic equation permits a wave/particle interpretation. Bohm introduced a
mathematical transformation that permits rewriting the equation as a modification
of Newton’s second law of motion, and this equation admits an interpretation in
terms of particles and particle trajectories.93 The probability density of particles in

89
Cf. Gibbins 1987, 43f., on Schrödinger and 45f. on Born.
90
Cf. Gibbins 1987, 52, on judgments about Heisenberg in the literature.
91
Heisenberg’s proposal is a quasi-pictorial interpretation based on a thought experiment. The
interpretation, together with the Heisenberg’s presupposed definition of the indeterminacy relation
has been refuted in the last decade according to A. Steinberg and others, Physical Review Letters,
104, Nr. 100404.
92
Cf. Gibbins 1987, ch. 4, esp. 48f., 53–56; cf. also Cushing 1994, 3.3.2.
93
Cf. Cushing 1994, 42.
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations of the Mathematical. . . 229

the Copenhagen interpretation is inherent to the structure of the quantum system.

Given the Bohm interpretation, probability density occurs because we cannot in
practice predict or control the location of a particle due to the unpredictable and
uncontrollable disturbances induced by the measuring apparatus. But this does not
imply that the particle does not have a precise location in principle. The use of
a statistical ensemble is, as in classical mechanics, only a practical necessity, and
does not represent the inherent state of the system. There is a statistical ensemble
and with it a probability density, but this is only the consequence of our ignorance
of the precise initial conditions of the particle.94
The Bohm interpretation preserves a non-relativistic Newtonian conception of
space and time, the motion of actual particles on continuous trajectories, event-
by-event causality, non-locality, and determinism.95 Statistical frequencies are not
inherent properties of quantum systems. Observation of phenomena in experimental
situations is restricted to statistical frequencies because it is impossible to determine
the initial conditions of the experimental situation. The initial conditions are not
observable because the measuring apparatus itself induces disturbances in the
motion of the particles.
Bohm’s hidden variables ontology has been called underdetermined. “Under-
determined” can be interpreted in two ways. The Bohm interpretation is under-
determined because it presupposes that for the observers the states of the system
lie behind a veil of practical ignorance. It is, however, also possible to understand
“underdetermined” in a broader sense. Bohm’s realistic interpretation and the anti-
realistic Copenhagen interpretation presuppose the same mathematical formalism,
the same experimental phenomena, and the same mathematical formalism for the
explanations of the phenomena. Both interpretations are compatible with these pre-
suppositions. Theories implying ontological interpretations are epistemologically
underdetermined if the choice of this or that ontological interpretation is not fully
determined by the underlying system of explanations.96
There are two basic questions for a phenomenological epistemology of post-
classical physics. The first question is whether ontological interpretations of the
mathematical theory and its application to the explanation of observable phenomena
in experimental situations are immediate implications of the theory and its applica-
tion, or whether such interpretations presuppose an added independent cognitive
activity.97 An answer to this questions presupposes the answer to the question
whether or not the theory and the theoretical entities of the theory admit quasi-
pictorial representations, a question mentioned in the beginning of the present
section.

94
Cf. Cushing 1994, 44f.
95
Cf. Cushing 1994, 46.
96
Cf. Cushing 1994, 205ff.
97
This question has been raised in the literature, e.g., in Cushing 1994, see table 2.1 and the
comments on the table 12f. Cushing seems to prefer the second horn of the dilemma.
230 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

The second question is whether ontological interpretations are necessary for the
epistemological analysis of the presuppositions for the success of the technological
applications of physics and of the natural sciences in general. The answer will be
negative. Instrumentalism connected with ontological quietism offers an alternative
that has its foundations in elementary understanding and only in elementary
understanding, without any admixture of higher understanding.
Answers to these questions once again require a brief recapitulation of some
viewpoints that have already been considered. Natural sciences have their foun-
dations in the experience of the lifeworld after the first abstraction in the spatial
and temporal structure of intersensory intuition on the one hand and in the
interests of elementary understanding on the other. The abstraction brackets the
practical interests of elementary understanding. What is left in the residuum of
the reduction is the interest in law-governed causal relations. The basic structures
of elementary understanding appear on the level of higher understanding as the
categories of the theoretical reflections on the ontology of nature in pre-scientific
philosophical reflections, i.e., without including epistemological reflections on the
natural sciences.
The immediate generative foundation for the emergence of physics is a suf-
ficiently developed mathematical theory. The requirement for the ontological
interpretation of classical physics was, in addition, that the mathematical theory
is able to justify the claim that physics itself is a true philosophy of nature based
on mathematical principles and written in mathematical symbols and, therefore, is
able to replace the old pre-scientific philosophical ontology of nature. The negation
implied in the replacement of the old philosophical ontology of nature as a partial
rejection that also implies serious modifications of the set of pre-scientific categories
that can still be applied in the new philosophy of nature.
The principles guiding the selections and modifications are the principles of
the applied mathematical theory, including analytic geometry and its extension in
the infinitesimal calculus. This mathematical theory presupposes as its foundation
Euclidean geometry, algebra, and, ultimately, the foundations of geometry and
algebra in the structure of the natural environment given in elementary under-
standing and intersensory intuition. As mathematical disciplines both disciplines
require idealizing mathematical abstractions and, in algebra, some elements of
formalizing abstractions. The mathematical theory remains, however, on the level
of mathematical objects as objects of idealizing abstractions.
The ontological categories of classical physics are, hence, categories that must
be definable in terms of this mathematical theory and only in terms of this theory. At
the time of Newton and later this theory was not understood as a pure mathematical
formalism. Mathematics itself could be and was understood at this time as a natural
science, and such an understanding is not compatible with an understanding of
mathematics as a pure formalism presupposing formalizing abstraction.
Thus the explanations of Newtonian physics regarding space and time are
abstractions that have not yet completely lost their connections with the empirical
basis of the natural sciences in the residuum of the first abstractive reduction. This
was a “natural” bridge for the transition from mathematically guided explanations
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations of the Mathematical. . . 231

to an ontological interpretation of the mathematical with ontological categories that

determine the real nature of physical phenomena. The ontological interpretation of
classical physics is, hence, not an added cognitive activity. It is immediately applied
with an understanding of mathematics as natural science.
An immediate implication of what has just been said is that quasi-pictorial
representations can be admitted in classical physics. They can be admitted because
they are still applicable to classical analytic geometry. The mathematical theory of
classical physics has been and can be understood as a theory of ideal objects given in
idealizing mathematical abstraction, but it can also be understood with hindsight as
a mathematical formalism given in formalizing abstraction. However, the possibility
of understanding the mathematical theory as an idealized representation of the
structure of intersensory experience is bracketed, excluded, for the ideal objects
in the residuum of formalizing abstraction.
Three steps toward pure mathematical formalisms that have been applied in
physics have been distinguished. The first step is the formal treatment of the axioms
of Euclidean geometry. Abstracting from the possibility of an intuitive interpretation
of the axioms, it is possible to introduce several types of changes in the system of
the axioms. The second step is the development of the theory of functions and the
infinitesimal calculus on the level of a mathematical formalism of higher algebra
and arithmetic that is able to be applied to non-Euclidean geometries. The final step
is the introduction of imaginary and complex numbers beyond real numbers in the
context of the mathematical formalisms of higher algebra.
The mathematical formalism of special relativity presupposes a four-dimensional
time-space continuum. The general theory adds the application of the principles of
Riemann’s non-Euclidean geometry. To call this continuum “space” is a metaphor.
It presupposes a purely formalistic understanding of mathematics. Pictorial repre-
sentations, even in the restricted sense of quasi-pictorial representations mentioned
above, are impossible in this context. The understanding of reality with the aid of
this formalism has lost its foothold in the idealized mathematical concepts of the
categories of intersensory experience found in classical physics. It has, however,
not lost its foothold in the reality of predictions of phenomena given in experimental
situations and causal explanations. There is convincing experimental evidence that
confirms the theory.
Serious objections have been raised against the use of pictorial representations in
the interpretation of the formalisms and the explanations of post-classical physics.98
However, such arguments also have serious implications for the idea of possible
ontological interpretations of the formalisms and the explanations of post-classical
physics. The presuppositions for the justification of the possibility of an immediate
interpretation of classical physics (not one that is merely added on to it) are
precisely the arguments that justify quasi-pictorial representations for the ideal
objects of classical physics. Arguments against pictorial representations for post-
classical physics are, hence, also arguments for the assumption that ontological

98
Cf., e.g., Gibbins 1987, 57f.
232 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

interpretations of the mathematical formalisms and explanations in post-classical

physics are not immediately implied in the theories. Such ontological interpretations
require additional reflections that justify added ontological interpretations.
As already mentioned, the “world” and the “world points” of an Ein-
stein/Minkowski world are ideal entities on the level of pure formalism; there is
no ontological interpretation of “local” and “non-local” for “world points” in the
Einstein/Minkowski “world” that can be traced back to the lived experience of
reality in the lifeworld.99 What can be said is that what “appears” as non-local for
comparatively small distances in the world of classical physics and in the lifeworld
is local in the “world” of relativity theory. The formalism represents, hence, a
“mathema-physical” world, “physical” understood in the sense both of nature, as
the physis of pre-scientific ontology and of nature in the world of classical physics.
In other words, this world is a world of things that are considered as they are in their
own right and appear first in the world of pre-scientific experience and then on the
level of idealizing abstraction as objects of the experience of classical physics.
But contrary to this Kantian model, this mathema-physical world of relativity
theory is immediately of significance for the recognition of causal relations and
prediction of facts in the realm of phenomena given for the immediate experience of
real things appearing in the lifeworld, and these facts can have tremendous impacts
in and for a lifeworld with sciences.100 The question is whether an ontological
interpretation of mathematical formalism and the explanation of empirical evidences
with the aid of that formalism can have an added ontological interpretation applying
a selection of modified categories of classical physics. There is a phenomenological
answer to the question what this “meta” meta-physics means in the case of relativity
theory.
The assumption of a limited speed of light determined the transition from
Newtonian space and time to Einstein’s space-time and this assumption is not at
odds with a descriptive account of the structure of intersensory experience. The
simultaneity of events beyond the limits of a face-to-face intersubjectively given
spatial environment is not observable. Seen from the viewpoint of the limited natural
environment of subjective and intersubjective experience a “message” from outside
refers to an author in a past Now that is outside the receiver’s natural environment
and thus given neither in the Now nor as a past Now in the past horizon of the
receiver. The structure that determines these properties of messages is the structure
of the natural environment, and there are other events in the natural environment
that share these properties.
It is a simple observation of scientific intersensory experience that the speed of
sound is limited and it is, therefore, also compatible with the structure of the natural
environment given in the lifeworld to assume that the speed of light is limited.

99
Cf. the question regarding what it really means if we read that the astronomer has observed now
what has happened distant past in a distant space measured in light years.
100
For instance: nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants. The problem of scientific technology
will be considered separately in Sect. 9.2.
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations of the Mathematical. . . 233

Thus it is also compatible with the structure of intersensory experience to assume

that simultaneity of events is restricted to comparatively small distances. Relativity
theory admits, even proves, the practical applicability of classical physics for natural
environments that are small compared with astrophysical distances. The application
is, however, only tolerable as an approximation referring only to the things as
they appear to us and not as they are supposed to be in their own right according
to the mathematical formalism of relativity theory. The upshot of this is that the
mathematical formalism of relativity theory is not able to represent an ontology.
There are, however, motives taken from puzzling aspects of the spatial-temporal
structure of the lifeworld and from classical physics that justify quasi-pictorial
representations per analogiam and that justify a metaphorical use of the these
categories of classical physics in a meta-physical ontology of relativity theory. The
analogy is in this case a strong analogy because only a few well-defined steps
beyond the mathematical formalism of classical physics qua formalism are required
for the development of the mathematical formalism of first the special and then the
general theory of relativity.
The situation is different in quantum theory. The axiom systems of the non-
Euclidean geometries and their treatment in Riemann’s extensions of analytic
theory can still be understood as modifications and extensions of a formalistic
interpretation of the mathematical theory that has been applied in classical physics.
The re-interpretation of the basic categories in the context of relativity theory
can also still be understood as metaphorical re-formulations of these categories
in the language of the mathematical formalism of relativity theory. However,
such an attempt is hopeless with respect to Hilbert spaces with indefinitely many
dimensions over a space of complex numbers; it needs, therefore, additional special
mathematical transformations like the Hermetian operator mentioned above to reach
mathematical expressions that can be applied to the measurements of contexts of
phenomena given in experimental situations on the level of intersensory intuition.
But precisely this need indicates that the formalism by itself offers no foothold for
ontological interpretations.
The problems for added ontological interpretations of the explanations in quan-
tum theory are, therefore, problems that already occur on the level of the empirical
basis, more precisely, on the level of measuring the phenomena in experimental
situations that are supposed to determine whether the underlying physical reality
has the character of a wave or a particle and of speed and momentum. Seen from the
viewpoint of classical physics the results of the measuring are ambiguous because
they end in statistical probabilities, i.e., in uncertainty. It can be said that the choice
of the mathematical formalism explaining this situation is justified precisely because
it allows projections that admit such uncertainties.101

101
See Gibbins 1987, 92f. This is not what Gibbins says explicitly in ch. 6 but what he says implies
that the choice of the Hilbert formalism is the necessary condition for a possible explanation of the
phenomena.
234 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

Given this situation, it is not a surprise that there are still competing ontological
interpretations of quantum theory that are more or less in accordance with the
same amount of experimental evidence and that there are two, the Copenhagen
interpretation and the Bohm interpretation, that cover the ground of all experimental
evidences for the mathematical formalism and its explanations. Seen from the
viewpoint of a systematic classification of philosophical positions, it is, furthermore,
impossible to understand these interpretations as ontological interpretations in direct
intention.
The main problem of quantum theory is not an ontological but an epistemological
problem. The added ontological interpretations presuppose epistemological view-
points. The natural sciences themselves, and especially physics as the prototype
of science, are in the center of the philosophical reflections since the seventeenth
century. Epistemological reflections determine what can be said about ontological
structures. However, the ontological interpretation of classical physics was under-
stood and can still be understood, as a replacement for pre-scientific philosophical
ontologies.
Presupposing what has been said above, it can be said that the Copenhagen
interpretation102 sticks to the phenomena and, therefore, can be characterized as
a type of positivism. It has also been said that the Copenhagen interpretation is anti-
realistic. It presupposes the inseparability of observer and observed and is, therefore,
a type of positivism that denies the possibility of recognizing nature as it is in itself.
However, it is also possible to add a meta-physical interpretation in the sense defined
above implying causal indeterminacy not only of nature, but of the world in general
and of the subject-object relation in the world.
The Copenhagen interpretation and the Bohm interpretation presuppose both the
space and time structure of classical physics103 in their interpretation of the relevant
phenomena given in the experimental situations in quantum mechanics. Prima
facie, the Bohm interpretation and the Copenhagen interpretation are diametrically
opposed. Roughly speaking, the Bohm interpretation is realistic because it presup-
poses hidden particles behind the frequency phenomena and the complementary
interpretation of these phenomena as waves and as particles. Quantum theory is,
according to this interpretation incomplete. It is necessary to presuppose hidden
variables and it is possible to reject indeterminacy and non-locality for such hidden
particles. The Copenhagen interpretation rejects most of the basic assumptions of
the ontology of classical physics.
The Bohm interpretation preserves the basic assumption of the ontology of
classical physics. It is, however, not a straightforward realistic ontology of nature
like classical physics. It is an added interpretation that implies epistemological
assumptions. The phenomena given in experimental situations do not refer imme-
diately to physical reality; they are appearances. The hypothetical assumption

102
The Copenhagen interpretation is not a monolithic systematic position, but rather a web of
partially different viewpoints in a discussion.
103
This is not the case with Einstein’s hidden variable interpretation.
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations of the Mathematical. . . 235

of a reality in itself (and its ontological categories) behind the appearances is

an ontological construction. Given the state of the art, there exists no positive
justification in empirical experimental evidence for the assumption. What justifies
the assumption is only that it is compatible with the formalism and the explanations
of the empirically given phenomena of quantum theory.
The task for a phenomenological epistemology is not to look for viewpoints for
the defense of one or the other of the interpretations. The basic problem is rather
the fact that there exist two incompatible interpretations and that there is, rebus sic
stantibus, no possibility to find any mathematical or empirical justification for one
of them together with the rejection of the other. Of phenomenological interest is
that both interpretations have one common denominator, namely, the suspicion that
the measuring instruments used in the experiments themselves have an impact on
the status of the object of measuring. One interpretation assumes mathema-physical
hidden entities and classical physical properties of the entities behind the screen
of this extraordinary experimental situation. The other interpretation additionally
presupposes epistemological assumptions about the subject-object relation, assump-
tions that imply mathema-physical consequences for the ontological nature of object
and subject.
Seen from the phenomenological point of view, natural science as an activity in
the lifeworld is guided by the interest in discoveries of causal connections regardless
of whether or not they are of practical interest for elementary understanding. The
activity of scientists is, nevertheless, a practical activity, and the indicator for the
generative foundations of empirical science in elementary understanding is that
the natural sciences use instruments. These instruments are tools used for precise
descriptions of phenomena that are, e.g., not visible for the naked eye, and they are
also used in the preparation of controlled experimental situations. The first and the
second abstraction brackets practical interests, but science nevertheless has one of its
generative foundations in elementary understanding because it shares the foundation
of elementary understanding in intersensory experience. It further shares and has its
generative foundation in the ability of elementary understanding to invent and to use
tools, instruments.
The guiding interest of the sciences in general in instruments is that instruments
can be used not only for the purposes of observation, but also for the preparation
of controlled experimental situations. The additional interest of the hard sciences
after the second abstraction is that the instruments provide precise measuring
of the quantity of the categories of the objects of physics: motion, acceleration,
force, energy, position, momentum, etc. It is science itself that has control that the
instruments (and to prove that they do what they are supposed to do) with the aid
of already established scientific theories, and it is, last but not least, the task of
scientific discoveries to develop new types of instruments that are able to do a better
job than the old ones.
One aspect of this task of controlling the instruments used in scientific research
with the aid of scientific theories was and is to ensure that the instrument, more
precisely the energy used by the instrument, does not disturb and modify the
observed object. This condition must be fulfilled for the justification that the
236 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

instrument permits an observation or representation of physical reality as it is in

itself. It is possible that critical scientific reflection can show with the aid of scientific
theories that a certain type of instrument is not able to fulfill these requirements.
However, this was not a problem as long as there was an open possibility of repairing
these shortcomings with different types of instruments that are able to fulfill the
requirements, e.g., to the possibility of using electron microscopes instead of
optical microscopes. Instead the problem of quantum mechanics is not only that the
instruments used to determine position and momentum in quantum systems disturb
the quantum systems, but that the assumption that they disturb the quantum systems
is backed by quantum theory itself, i.e., according to the given state of the art, it is
impossible in principle to invent instruments that can repair this shortcoming.
This is a new situation for the status of ontological interpretations of the theoret-
ical entities of physics and the hard sciences in general. According to what has been
said above, for contemporaries classical physics implied an ontology, a philosophy
of nature written in mathematical symbols. Though the use of “ontology” is in this
case a metaphor, the general theory of relativity implies the ontology of a four-
dimensional space with curvatures of space and events that can be characterized
as world points in the context of such a world. In both cases there is no reason to
assume that the observations in experimental situations disturb the observed inertial
systems, and it is also not possible to assume that there is more than one meaningful
ontological interpretation of the mathematical formalism and the explanations of the
phenomena with the aid of this formalism.
The phenomenological account of the problem of instruments used in quantum
theory indicates first of all that the philosophical interpretation claiming the
inseparability of observer and observed ought not to be misunderstood as the thesis
of the inseparability of subject and object, e.g., in the sense of a Kantian version of
a transcendental epistemology. The problem is not the cognitive status of observers
qua epistemological subjects. According to another now quasi-pictorial proposal,
the problem is the instrumental apparatus used for the observation of the object, and
the epistemological subject is well aware in this case that it is the instrument and
not the structure of its own cognitive apparatus that causes the problem.
The “crisis” of the understanding of the hard sciences is, hence, first of all a crisis
of the problem of the ontological interpretation of the mathematical formalisms
used in scientific explanations of measurable phenomena. The interest in ontological
interpretations of the formalism is not a problem for the application of the formalism
in successful scientific explanations. The latter interest has its generative foundation
in elementary understanding, and science has a high value from this point of view
because it is useful for technological applications of scientific research on the level
of elementary understanding in a cultural lifeworld with sciences. Natural science
has, hence, a value because for elementary understanding it is a tool, an instrument
for the realization of practical purposes and goals.
The interest in the ontological interpretation of the mathematical formalisms
that can be used in explanations of the things in the world as the real world, of
nature as it is in itself and not as it appears to us, has its generative foundation in
higher understanding, and there first of all in a pre-scientific theoretical philosophy
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations of the Mathematical. . . 237

of natura, i.e., of physis. The abstraction from practical interests in the lifeworld
in the broadest sense is constitutive for natural science as a theoretical cognitive
attitude belonging to higher understanding. This attitude, the interest in knowing
how things really are, was the dominating factor in the development of the natural
sciences, and it is still a dominating factor for the self-understanding of science.
However, it is also possible to adopt an attitude of being interested in science only
because the output of insights in causal relations can be applied for the practical
purposes of elementary understanding on the level of a scientific technology.
Instrumentalism as an epistemological position justifies science as a procedure for
finding methodologically reliable predictions for technological purposes.
Successful technological applications are nothing other than a series of further
confirmations for scientific theories. The original question whether or not science
tells us how things really are is an idle question of scientific “theories.” Seen
from the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology, this thesis implies that
scientific theories are not of significance for higher understanding.104 Quite apart
from the fact that this understanding of the natural sciences is what guides the
evaluation of scientific activities for the vast majority of laymen including those
in business, politics, and in the meantime unfortunately even education, this
understanding has also become a motive for the practical self-understanding of
scientists who are disinterested in ontological interpretations. This disinterest has
also been characterized as ontological quietism.105
It is an essential consequence of instrumentalism as a consistent epistemology
of science that mathematical formalisms are of interest for research in the hard
sciences only because they can be applied as instruments producing reliable
predictions and explanations of the phenomena. It is not necessary to assume
mathematical objects that can be given in idealizing and formalizing abstractions.
The nominalistic interpretation of mathematical objects as signs or symbols with
syntactical rules determining well-formed formulas that admit transformations only
in operations that are guided by strictly defined systems of rules is sufficient for
an instrumentalistic epistemology of the natural sciences. Mathematical formalisms
“work” for predictions that are required in technological applications. It is natural
for the instrumentalist to assume that computers “think” and are as such ideal
instruments for doing mathematics, since the value of mathematics is a value only
because mathematics can be used as an instrument.
Instrumentalism can, of course, be criticized as a crude type of philosophical util-
itarianism,106 but seen from the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemological

104
Instrumentalism is an understanding of science that is welcome in all types of religious
fundamentalisms.
105
Cf. Gibbins 1987, 75, 160.
106
To call it pragmatism would be an offense to the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and
partially also that of William James.
238 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

analysis this criticism does not touch the real problem. The introduction of
transcendent, imaginary, complex numbers and finally transfinite numbers in the
nineteenth century has caused discomforts for some mathematicians and episte-
mological reflections on mathematics, last but not least for the intuitionists. For
a phenomenological epistemology of mathematics, the reason for this discomfort is
the transition from a mathematical formalism that still has quasi-pictorial referential
objects given in mathematical idealizations to a pure algebraic formalism. The
referents of the symbols and operations of this extended algebraic formalism are
pure formal ontological essences given in formalizing abstraction, and this also
implies an abstraction from all mathematical idealizations that admit quasi-pictorial
representations.
The transition from classical to post-classical physics has caused much less dis-
comfort among physicists. The basic question for physics is whether a mathematical
formalism is able to derive hypotheses about causal relations, to admit deductive
systems of confirmed hypotheses, and to derive new hypotheses from such systems.
The further problem of the immediate applicability of the well-formed formulas of
the purely algebraic formalism that can be applied to the description of phenomena
in experimental situations not only lurks in the background, but surfaces in the
need for special “translation operators” that mediate between the language of the
descriptions and the language of the theory.107
Of course this problem in the background is not a problem for instrumentalism
and ontological quietism. It is, however, a problem for ontological interpretations
and in general for the question concerning what it means to say that the natural
sciences are able to reveal what nature really is. What is required is the ability
to apply mathematical formalism in a physics that does not admit straightforward
ontological interpretations of objects of experience as in classical physics, but
only quasi-metaphysical ontological interpretations. “Quasi-metaphysical” is a
metaphor. Metaphors that are not merely puns presuppose analogical similarity.
An analogy can have real heuristic value if it is possible to determine borderlines
between the structural similarities and structural dissimilarities implied in the
analogy.
The application of ontological categories (i.e., of beings given in the experience
of objects in the created world) in onto-theological speculations about the essence
of God caused serious difficulties for the pre-scientific scholastic ontology of the
Middle Ages. The answer was that the onto-theological application is an application
per analogiam. It was, however, also a problem for ontologies that presupposed
epistemological reflections in general, and especially on the natural sciences. A
prototype is the Kantian ontology of principles of pure experience. This ontology
has empirical reality for objects of experience. However, it is not applicable for the
metaphysical realm of things considered in themselves. An attempt to apply them

107
Cf., e.g., what has been said above about the Hermetian operator in quantum mechanics.
8.4 The Difficulties of Ontological Interpretations of the Mathematical. . . 239

in metaphysics ends in contradiction. Only an analogical application, a symbolic

understanding that uses analogies, is possible.108
A comparatively naïve understanding of mathematically idealized categories
such as cause, mass, and energy as ontological categories was possible for the
ideal objects of classical physics. But it is impossible for the ideal objects of post-
classical formalisms and their relation to observable objects. The ideal objects of
the mathesis universalis on the level of formalizing abstraction do not admit quasi-
pictorial representations. There is no intuitive bridge connecting the ideal objects
with the observable objects given in experimental situations. They are prima facie
something like the Kantian things in themselves.
The essential structural difference is that the relations and the whole system of
these quasi-metaphysical “things in themselves” are not only explicable in terms of
the mathesis universalis on the level of formal ontology, but are also of significance
for predictions, hypotheses, and the discovery of laws for causal relations between
the observable objects, the phenomena given in experimental situation. They are in
this respect still connected with the objects of experience and of significance for the
objects of experience given in the lifeworld. However, nothing beyond that can be
said about the ideal objects that are given in formalizing abstraction. They are only
accessible for ontological interpretations that connect them with the lived experience
in the lifeworld per anlogiam, and in this sense mathema-physical.
It is possible to give an explication of the meaning of “mathema-physical” in
terms of an extension of Kant’s critical reflections on the “presuppositions of the
possibility” of classical physics. Kant’s principles of pure understanding can be
recognized as a satisfactory account of the categories of a general ontology of
physics as well as of the possibility of interpreting these categories for first-order
understanding in terms of classical Newtonian mathematics and physics. The objects
of physics given for the principles of pure understanding can be given in quasi-
pictorial representations presupposing only the pure forms of the intuition a priori.
However, the theoretical entities of post-classical physics cannot be given in the
forms of intuition in any sense.
They are objects of formalizing abstractions beyond the realm of intuition,
objects of the “pure reason” not of Kant, but of a Leibnizean characteristica
universalis. They are in this sense the mathema-physical things in themselves.
The crucial difference between these things in themselves m and Kantian things
in themselves is that they are still objects of physics as an empirical science because
the theories about this type of things in themselves have to be and are testable in
experiments that refer to phenomena given in intersensory observation. It is the
methodology of the experiments that connects the level of the sensible world of
intersensory observation with the “supersensible” world of relativity theory and
quantum theory.

108
Cf., e.g., Kant KGS V, Critique of Judgment §90, section 2.
240 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

8.5 The Empirical Basis and Theories in the Life Sciences

Hard or exact sciences require the second methodological abstraction that is, in
addition, a reductive abstraction. The first methodological abstraction determines
the empirical basis of the soft sciences. The empirical basis under the first abstrac-
tion admits phenomena that are not explicable with the mathematically idealized
system of categories of the hard sciences under the second abstraction. In other
words, the descriptions of observables in the soft sciences include references to the
so-called secondary qualities. The soft sciences admit, furthermore, the application
of ontological categories that cannot be defined in terms of the mathematical for-
malisms, but they also admit categories that are defined in terms of a mathematical
formalism in the hard sciences without referring to such definitions. According to
the analyses of Sect. 8.1, the definition of, e.g., efficient causality in the context of
Mill’s analysis of experimental situations is sufficient for the soft sciences. The soft
sciences are nevertheless able to apply measurements to measurable aspects of their
observables. Counting and measuring are techniques that have already been used
on the level of pre-scientific elementary understanding for practical purposes and
the bracketing of the practical purposes, after the first abstraction does not imply
the bracketing of these techniques. A further question is whether and how the soft
sciences can be reduced to the hard sciences.
Chemistry is an example of a science that was “soft” in the beginning and could
eventually be reduced to physics without causing ontological problems. Chemistry
has its pre-scientific foundation in the elementary understanding of the application
of mixtures of materials for practical purposes, e.g., the mixture of copper and
other metals in different kinds of bronze. The history of the development of
such techniques and their social impact in pre-scientific cultural lifeworlds is of
outstanding significance for the history of elementary understanding as well as for
history in general, and especially for the pre-history of chemistry as a science. The
period of chemistry as a soft science came to its end with Lavoisier’s table of the
elements at the end of the eighteenth century. The new theory of elements, atoms,
and molecules was the presupposition for the reduction of chemistry to classical
physics on the level of submolecular particles and then to the physics of subatomic
particles in post-classical physics, especially in quantum theory.
The situation is different in the life sciences. The life sciences can be called
soft sciences not only because they admit references to secondary qualities in the
description of observables, but also because they presuppose ontological categories
cannot be defined in terms of the mathematically idealized categories of the hard
sciences and are, therefore, excluded from the residuum of the second abstraction.
A rough survey of the historical development of ontological reflections on the life
sciences can serve as a preparation for the phenomenological analysis of these
categories.
The distinction between living beings as “animated” entities that are subject to
generation and corruption and depend in their existence on more or less favorable
circumstances in their environment, on the one hand, and materials that can be used
8.5 The Empirical Basis and Theories in the Life Sciences 241

in the techniques of craftsmanship, on the other hand, is already an essential aspect

of the pre-scientific systems of elementary understanding. It was also an essential
aspect of healing wounds and illness not only of humans, but also of animals in
the pre-scientific medical arts. The outstanding significance of living beings in the
natural environment for the systems of elementary understanding dominates early
types of religions: animism, shamanism, and polytheistic religions on the level of
higher understanding.
The categories of form and matter, material, formal, and final causes, potentiality
and actuality, generation and corruption, and the ontological application of the
logical categories genus, species, and specific difference for the classification of
animals and plants are essential for the pre-scientific Aristotelian ontology of nature.
The necessary condition for the existence of organic life, the material cause, is
inorganic matter. Essential for the emergence of organic life and organisms are the
formal causes determining the specific forms of organisms. Formal causes are the
forces behind the potential generation of the realized actuality of organic life in
matter, and the decreasing power of formal causes initiates corruption of organisms.
The naturalistic interpretation of Aristotle reduced final causality to formal
causality. Final causality is also excluded by the first abstraction. Formal causality
had to be excluded or reduced to an efficient causality because only efficient
causality admits a definition in terms of mathematical idealizations in classical
physics. The ontological interpretation of classical physics by the Cartesians already
implied the reduction of formal causality to efficient causality. The consequence is
that animals and later even humans have to be understood as machines. Formal
causes are admitted as teleological causes in the life sciences only as heuristic
guidelines that have to prepare the path toward the final explanation of organic life
with the aid of the general principles of the hard sciences.109
Quite apart from the circumstances at that time (and ultimately even for the
present state of the art) convincing experimental evidence was still missing, a
theory of the emergence of organic life out of inorganic matter has in addition
serious ontological implications. Organic life has categorial structures that are not
immediately explicable in terms of the categorial structures of inorganic matter,
i.e., in terms of ontological interpretations of theories in the hard sciences. Matter
would be more than that which can be described and defined in terms of these
interpretations. It would have in addition some creative potential because it creates
entities with complex ontological structures that must be added to the set of
categorial structures of the objects of classical physics. Ontological considerations
of this problem can turn the tables. Vitalism and in general ontological theories of
nature emphasizing the creative power of nature tacitly reintroduce nature itself as
the source not only of efficient causes but also formal causes.

109
Kant’s application of “purpose,” a category of practical philosophy, in his Critique of Judgment
as a heuristic principle for the life sciences can serve as an outstanding example (KGS V, §§63–
65, 78, 80–82). It will be shown that this is not acceptable for a phenomenological epistemological
analysis of the methodology of the life sciences.
242 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

It is the task of empirical research to find out whether and how organic wholes
can emerge out of inorganic matter, and whether and how the life sciences can
be reduced to the hard sciences. The task of a phenomenological epistemology
is restricted to the analysis of the cognitive attitude of the life sciences and
their intentional correlate, the ontological region of organic entities. It includes in
addition the analysis of the relations between the categories of the ontological region
of organic life and the categories of the ontological region of inorganic matter.
Such analyses are, however, able to decide the question whether the reduction of
the life sciences to the hard sciences is an ideal formal ontological possibility and
then a material ontological possibility. This will be the case if it can be shown that
the ontological region of inorganic matter is the static and genetic foundation of
the ontological region of organisms. Three basic problems for a phenomenological
epistemology of the life sciences can be distinguished
(1) The first problem is the analysis of the formal categorial structures of the formal
ontological theory of the whole and the parts, on the one hand, and the formal
ontological theory of unit and manifold, on the other hand.
(2) The second problem is the constitution of the cognitive attitude governing
the methods of the life sciences and their intentional correlate, the material
ontological region of organisms, on the one hand, and the cognitive attitude
governing the methods of hard sciences and their correlate, the ontological
region of inorganic matter, on the other. The problem of the difference between
these cognitive attitudes is in (2) the determination of the scope and the limits
of the application of efficient causal relations in the life sciences.
(3) The analyses that are relevant for the first and the second problem are problems
for static phenomenological considerations. The third problem requires in
addition analyses that belong to genetic phenomenology. Two levels of this
problem can be distinguished. The first (3.a) is the problem of the ontological
interpretation and explication of the guiding force of the formal causality of pre-
scientific ontology in the life sciences. The second problem (3.b) is the question
of the guiding force and its essential structures governing the process of the
evolution of organisms.
(1) An analysis of the ontological structures of organic entities for the purposes
of phenomenological epistemology has to start on the level of the formal
ontological theory of the whole and the parts. A recapitulation of essential
aspects of what has been said in Sect. 1.2 is sufficient. Organic wholes have
the structure of second-order wholes. The parts of wholes of second order are
one-sidedly founded in the whole and are held together by relations between
independent parts, not by immediate foundations between dependent parts as in
first-order wholes. An organic whole is a whole of the lowest level of second-
order wholes. It is a structural whole of relations between independent parts of
a concrete whole that are wholes of the first order and not of second order,
i.e., they are not themselves organic wholes. They are, hence, not able to
exist as independent wholes of the second order in more than one whole of
higher order like the parts of wholes of a higher order. Only concrete organic
8.5 The Empirical Basis and Theories in the Life Sciences 243

wholes, and beyond them wholes of a higher levels of the second order can
be independent parts of wholes of the next higher levels of wholes of second-
order, e.g., as members of communities with different degrees of complexity
(presupposing in some cases different structures in the organic wholes that are
their independent parts). Such communities of organic wholes are of course also
intentional objects for the cognitive attitude of the life sciences.110
The key for an answer to the question of the formal ontological ideal possibility
of a reduction of the life sciences to the hard sciences is the answer to the further
question of the formal ontological relation between the theory of the whole and
the parts on the one hand and the formal ontological theory of the basic categories
of the mathesis unit and manifolds on the other. Either they are two independent
formal ontological theories on the same level of universality or one of them belongs
to a higher logical level of universality. The formal ontological structures of the
theory of a higher level of universality abstract from the “specific differences” of
structures of theories on the lower level of universality, but they are applicable in
principle to all entities that are determined in addition by the formal categories of
the formal ontological theory of a lower order. This implies, however, that the formal
ontological structures of higher logical order are formal ontological foundations for
the formal ontological structures of a lower order. It is obvious that the reduction
of organic life to inorganic matter is a priori a formal ontological impossibility if
the answer is “yes” to the first horn of the dilemma and “no” to the second. The
reduction is, however, an ideal possibility if the answer is “no” to the first and “yes”
to the second horn of the dilemma.
A brief recapitulation of some relevant viewpoints already discussed in Sects.
1.2 and 7.2 is sufficient for the justification of a “yes” to the second horn. The
categorial system of the objects of the hard sciences is explicable in the language
of mathematical formalisms. The two basic categories of the formal ontological
structure of a mathesis, unit and manifolds or collections of units, determine the
formal structure of the system of natural numbers. Seen from the viewpoint of
formal ontology, natural numbers are collections of individual units without an
intrinsic formal structure, units that are related to each other in a well-ordered,
dense, and indefinitely extended open sequence. All other numbers, including
imaginary and complex numbers, are products of more or less sophisticated
mathematical operations.
The analysis of the application of counting on the level of elementary understand-
ing has shown that counting can be applied not only to all objects that are concrete
wholes, but also to the abstract properties, i.e., dependent parts of concrete wholes.
Measuring as counting of units and numbers as units in measuring can be applied to
all dependent parts that belong to the genus extension. But this means that all entities
under the formal ontological categories of the whole and the parts can be considered

110
Humans live in communities, and animals do too. Family communities of both require different
organic structures of their members, first of all of the sexes and some communities of insects
require more complex systems of such differences.
244 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

as units and collections of units if the formal ontological differences pertaining to

the categories of the theory of the whole and the parts are excluded with the aid of
a generalizing abstraction determining a realm in which all of them, including the
wholes themselves, are mathematical units in collections that can be themselves be
considered as units, etc. The answer to the above-mentioned dilemma is, therefore,
“no” to the first and “yes” to the second horn of the dilemma.
The formal ontological theory of unit and manifolds is, hence, one-sidedly
founding for the formal ontological theory of the whole and the parts. Manifolds
of concrete wholes as well as independent parts can be counted. A reduction of the
material ontological structures of organic entities is, hence, an ideal possibility. It is
only an ideal possibility because a genetic foundation of B in A requires, beyond A,
the additional structures and properties C for B. What has to be added to this will be
considered in (2) and (3).
(2) After the second abstraction, the description of the phenomena of physics is
reduced to the properties and relations that are of relevance for the mathe-
matically idealized categorial system of physical objects. The material given
for the descriptions and preliminary classifications of phenomena of the life
sciences is of a higher degree of complexity. The task of the precise description
and classification of organisms and parts of organisms in the life sciences
without any admixtures of causal explanations is a basic part of zoological and
botanical research. A verbal representation of the objects of the life sciences
needs terms for colors, sounds, even smells, in short, for everything that is still
given in the empirical basis after the first abstraction but will be excluded by
the second abstraction. The descriptions of phenomena that are characteristic
for organic life and the huge manifold of different types of organisms in their
outer and inner structure, as well as in the relations to their environments
admit and even require pictorial representations that are able to support verbal
descriptions.
The difficulties of providing adequate descriptive accounts of the relevant
phenomena have consequences for the structure of empirical research in the life
sciences. The first consequence is that observation, the description of phenomena,
and discoveries of new opportunities for observations are of much greater signif-
icance in the life sciences than in the hard sciences. Even descriptions of a new
organic species or of essential parts of an organic entity without any references to
causal relations count as “discoveries” in the life sciences.
The second consequence is that a precise determination of initial conditions in
experimental situations is difficult, and in many cases even practically impossible.
Organisms belonging to the same species react in more or less different ways to the
added factors in experimental situations that are supposed to cause this or that effect.
Experimental research is, therefore, explicable in terms of refined versions of Mill’s
methods, and is in many cases restricted to the discovery of statistic causalities.
The first task of a phenomenological epistemology is, hence, to analyze the
structure of the empirical basis of the life sciences or, in the terminology of Ideas
8.5 The Empirical Basis and Theories in the Life Sciences 245

II and III,111 to carry out the analysis of the structures of the material regional
ontology of the life sciences. The second task is the analysis of the cogitative types
of the methodology of experiments, of the predictions, and the explanations in the
life sciences.
Two levels of universality and three dimensions on both levels can be distin-
guished in the descriptions of the phenomena of the empirical basis, the material
ontological region of the life sciences. The first dimension of the first level is
the description of the phenomena in which the lowest species of living organism
are given as concrete wholes for intersensory intuition. The second dimension of
the first level is the description of the independent parts of organisms as concrete
wholes and the third dimension is the dimension of the specific environment of
species of organic beings. The second level of descriptions presupposes generalizing
abstractions for the constructions of taxonomies for species of organisms. The
generalizing abstractions presuppose as their empirical basis the descriptions of the
first level in all three dimensions.
Descriptions of lowest species of organic wholes presuppose variations in
imagination of the material contents of wholes that are constitutive for the schemata
underlying the empirical concepts of species of organic wholes. The rules guiding
the variations are determined by the formal ontological structures of organic wholes.
According to what has been said in Sect. 2.1, the ideal case beyond that would be
variations that are sufficient for the constitution of the morphological essence of,
e.g., the eidos “lion,” or probably better, the empirical type “lion.”
The second dimension of the description of phenomena that are necessary for the
explication of the material categories of organic life and organisms has to determine
the material characteristics of the parts of organic wholes. The independent parts of
organic wholes cannot be simultaneously parts of other organic wholes, and they
cannot exist independently outside the system of their functions of the organic
whole. They will decay if they are separated from the whole without providing
an artificial environment that can substitute for the whole or stop the process of
decay. The description of the inner independent parts of an organic whole requires
anatomical research. Anatomy in the broadest sense requires instruments, including
instruments today presupposing technologies that have been developed with the aid
of the hard sciences, e.g., x-rays.
The description of the environment of a species and the ecological relation of
the species to the environment is not of immediate significance for the simple
recognition of the species of an individual organic being or for the development
of taxonomies for organic species. It is, however, of significance for experimental
research and for the discovery of causal relations between organisms as concrete
wholes (or their parts) and certain properties or aspects of their environments.
The basic scheme for the development of taxonomies is the formal ontological
and apophantic logical structure of genus, species, and specific differences for

111
See Hua IV, the title of Hua V, and the original project of the second volume of the Ideas
sketched out in the introduction of Hua III/1; cf. also Hua III/1 §60; and Seebohm 2013
246 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

substances, i.e., concrete wholes. The constitution of taxonomies is the correlate

on the second level of descriptions, and presupposes imaginative variations that
are guided by differences in chosen characteristics of partial aspects of the lowest
species of concrete wholes.112 This basic scheme dominates the structure of
linguistic communication in elementary understanding and has been recognized
as a basic ontological and logical structure in pre-scientific philosophy. From
the very beginning, the ideal and perfect realms of entities that can be thought
within the framework of this conceptual scheme have been the realms of organic
beings. Taxonomic systems of the life sciences are, however, of a higher degree of
complexity because they have to refer to all three dimensions of the descriptions of
the phenomena that are constitutive for the ontological region of organic entities.
Descriptions of phenomena given in the residuum of the first abstraction, i.e.,
in the soft natural sciences in general and, therefore, in the life sciences as well,
admit pictorial representations. Pictorial representations of an individual belonging
to a species of organisms, e.g., a photograph, are insufficient. The descriptions of
the lowest species admit pictorial representations that can serve as symbols for
the material morphological essence of the species only if they highlight specific
features, the specific differences of the species indicating the rules of a schematic
representation, e.g., the schema of a dog in Kant’s example. Pictorial representations
of schemata of species of higher orders of universality can also be used for the
illustration of taxonomies. The ability to use pictorial representations, and not only
quasi-pictorial representations and quasi-pictorial representations per analogiam,
indicates both the borderline between the soft and the hard sciences and the
foundation of this borderline in the distinction between the first and the second
abstraction in the natural sciences.
The relations between independent parts of an organic whole are of significance
for the existence of the organic whole because they have functions that connect them
with other parts of the organic whole and finally with the organic whole itself. The
environment is of significance for an organic whole and its parts only if it has parts
and aspects that have a function for the existence of the organic whole. Both types
of functions are understood on the level of elementary understanding as purposeful
for the organic whole, and on the level of higher understanding in pre-scientific
philosophical ontologies, such purposes are understood as final causes. Purposes
(and with them, final causes) are excluded by the first abstraction.
The scientific explication of the relation between the parts and between the whole
and the parts in the whole of an organism in the life sciences after the first reduction
is prima facie an explication of one-sided or reciprocal efficient causal relations.
Such causal relations between the parts of an organic whole, or between the parts
and the organic whole itself can be discovered in empirical experimental research.
The phenomena given in such experimental situations are given in the residuum of

112
E.g., the organs serving the purpose of reproduction in the case of plants.
8.5 The Empirical Basis and Theories in the Life Sciences 247

the first abstraction. The cognitive attitude of experimental research under the first
reduction is, as mentioned above, explicable in terms of Mill’s descriptive analysis
of the methodology of experiments.
There are two types of hypotheses about efficient causal relations that can be
tested in experiments in the life sciences. The first type of hypotheses about causal
relations between parts of the organic whole and its environment can refer to
observable phenomena given in the empirical basis of intersensory experience after
the first abstraction. The purpose of the experiments is, on the one hand, to check
whether such causal relations explain how the functioning or malfunctioning of parts
of the organism affect other organs and the organism as a whole and on the other
hand to discover the significance of certain aspects of the environment of organic
wholes for certain species of organisms. The disadvantage of experiments in the
life sciences is that the amount and the structure of interdependencies of initial
conditions in an individual organism and in its environment is so large and complex
that many of the causal laws that can be discovered in such experimental situations
are statistical causal laws.
The only way to reach beyond the realm of statistical causalities is the application
of strict causal explanations and predictions of the second type. The second type
of predictions and causal explanations in the life sciences are applications of causal
laws that can be confirmed in the hard sciences. Some of them, first of all the laws of
classical push-pull mechanics, presuppose only descriptions of phenomena that are
available under the first reduction and were already accessible on the level of pre-
scientific elementary understanding. Others are available if causal laws referring
to physiological phenomena can be reduced to laws of organic chemistry. Since
chemistry can be reduced to physics, it can be said that the soft methodology of
experimental research in the life sciences should be reduced and backed by the
standards of the hard methodology of the hard sciences wherever this is possible
because only the methodology of experimental research in the hard sciences is able
to confirm strict causal laws. This reduction is a reduction of methodologies that are
interested in the confirmation of the laws of efficient causality, and as such is not
immediately relevant for the ontological question of the reducibility of the categorial
system of the soft sciences to the categorial system of the hard sciences.
The advantage of a phenomenological epistemology in this respect is that there is
no need to preserve concepts like “purpose,” “final cause,” or “teleology” as neces-
sary ontological categories or heuristic principles. The reduction of the methodology
of empirical experimental research in the life sciences to methodological principles
of the hard sciences is a progress toward the realization of a methodological ideal
that can be justified not only in the context of a phenomenological formal ontology
as shown in (1) in the present section, but also by a phenomenological analysis of
the material ontological region determining the empirical basis of the soft and the
hard sciences, and finally by the phenomenology of the cognitive attitude of the
soft natural sciences after the first abstraction and the cognitive attitude of the hard
natural sciences after the second abstraction.
There is the ideal possibility of reducing the vague category of efficient causal
relations on the level of the material ontology of organic entities to the strict causal
248 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

relations of the hard sciences. Efficient causal relations between the independent
parts of an organic whole, and between aspects in the environment of the organic
whole and the organic whole, can refer to descriptions of phenomena that belong
to the so-called secondary qualities. Efficient causal relations referring to secondary
qualities can be explicated in terms of primary qualities, i.e., the efficient causal
relations between measurable aspects of qualities.113 How far this reduction is
possible is a question of empirical research.
(3) Explanations presupposing confirmed laws of efficient causal relations are
obviously able to explain changes in pre-given organisms caused by functions
and malfunctions of the parts, the inner organs of the organism, and/or by
factors in the environment of the organism. It is not obvious how they are able
to provide an answer to the questions of the laws that determine the structure
of the genesis of organisms and the ability of organisms to inherit these laws
from their predecessors. In terms of pre-scientific ontology, it is not obvious
how explanations that are restricted to efficient causes are able to replace the
assumption of formal causes. And beyond this it is also not obvious how such
efficient causal laws are able to explain the history of the evolution of organic
species.
Observations and descriptions of phenomena with the aid of sophisticated
instruments provided by technologies that presuppose the hard sciences, e.g.,
microscopes, are able to discover that cells are the last independent organic parts of
parts of more complex organisms. Like all other parts of organisms that have been
separated from them, these smallest independent parts will decay if no artificial
environment can be provided for them or if they are not embedded as a part
or parts in another organism. However, observations with such instruments are
also able to discover that independent organic wholes of the lowest degree of
complexity are single-celled microorganisms. They also have parts, but the smallest
independent parts of microorganisms are molecular compounds, proteins, below
them amino acids, and finally carboxyl groups that are of interest for organic
chemistry. Organic chemistry can be reduced to inorganic chemistry. The material
ontological categories of organic wholes are, hence, in the last instance one-sidedly
founded in the categorial system of the ontological region of the hard sciences.
The existence of organic wholes in general depends, furthermore, first of all
on their metabolism and on the existence of favorable circumstances in their
environment. Other organisms are of significance in this respect, but the just
mentioned chemical building blocks of organic life are of ultimate significance.
Seen from the viewpoint of material ontology, this material categorial aspect of the
dependency of organisms once again has the character of a one-sided foundation but
precisely that does not mean that organic life can be reduced to the system of the

113
Nota bene: this reduction is an explicative reduction of the efficient causes, not of dependent
parts in a concrete whole. Blue is a dependent part of a whole of the first order of the genus quality
that cannot be reduced to a dependent part of the genus extension of the same concrete whole.
8.5 The Empirical Basis and Theories in the Life Sciences 249

categories of the hard sciences. What is again in question is the factor C that must
be added to the founding material ontological region A for the emergence of entities
belonging to the material ontological region B.114
This categorial irreducibility does not imply that it is impossible for empiri-
cal research to discover opportunities for descriptions of the circumstances that
accompany, as initial conditions, the emergence of living organisms out of inorganic
matter. Given this, the next problem is to reconstruct such circumstances in
experiments, and even to develop a technology to produce primitive organisms.
Apart from the difficulty of an unambiguous interpretation of the ontological cat-
egories of quantum theory, such a reconstruction implies changes in the ontological
interpretation of the categorial framework of the hard sciences, changes that will
be considered below. Two problems must be distinguished. The first (3.a) is the
problem of the force behind the generation and corruption of living organisms. The
second (3.b) is the process of the evolution of the species.
(3.a) was already a problem for pre-scientific higher understanding. The answer of
monotheistic religions was that God created living organisms and determined
the laws for the generation and corruption of animals and plants. The answer
of pre-scientific ontologies of nature was either the assumption of a formal
cause or the assumption of a kind of matter or atoms that have the creative
power to develop such forms. On this level and in general later before
the nineteenth century, it was beyond question that the different types of
organisms have existed since the beginning of the world and that they will
exist as long as the world exists.
The answer of pre-scientific ontology to the first problem, the question of the
force or power behind the generation of organic life, was the assumption of a
specific type of cause, the formal cause. Corruption starts if the force of the
formal cause is exhausted. The scientific explication of the pre-scientific ontological
category “formal cause” in the life sciences is the theory of the genetic code. Since
its initial appearance early in the twentieth century, genetics has been until the
decoding of DNA-sequences in the second half of the Twentieth century the most
rapidly developing theoretical discipline of the life sciences. The methodology of
the theory is experimental research, i.e., the testing, confirming, and refuting of
hypotheses referring to descriptions and classifications of phenomena. However,
the presupposed description requires more than the description of phenomena in an
experimental situation. What is required is the description of the genesis of species
of organisms, and even perhaps of individual organisms belonging to a species. It
is not the description of a present experimental situation. The description has the
structure of a narration about a development, a series of changes in a temporal
sequence.
This straightforward solution for the first problem seems to be clear enough,
but it entails ontological problems. The explication of causal relations in the

114
Cf. Part I, Sect. 2.2.
250 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

methodological framework of Mill’s theory of experimental research in the life

sciences refers to effective causes. Effective causes are factors that immediately
trigger either an immediate change or a series of further changes in structure of
organic wholes in the future, e.g., the development of a disease. The effect of an
efficient cause is in both cases a disturbance in the material structure of an organic
whole. A formal cause “causes” the genesis of an organic being step by step and
so do the genetic codes if they are understood as the scientific explication of formal
causes.
The ontological difficulty for this solution of problem (3.a) is the meaning of the
metaphor “code.” Decoding in the sciences of interpretation is the decoding of a
written language. Decoding as deciphering is the first step toward an understanding
of the meaning of the code. As such, the immediate reference of the term “code”
and “decoding” or “deciphering” is a method that belongs to the human sciences as
sciences of interpretation. The deciphering of a genetic code as a natural cause has
to be something else. Another model would be a graphic representation of a building
or a machine together with instructions for how to produce these artifacts step by
step. This metaphor refers to techniques and technologies that require practical
activities. But this reference implies an application of the pre-scientific category,
final cause.
Final causes, however, are excluded from the residuum of the first abstraction.
What comes closest is to use the metaphor “computer program.” Given a program,
a computer if it is started by a certain input produces an output step by step in
a temporal sequence. The program is a code, and after a genetic code is initiated
in a similar way it produces the living organism as an organic whole. Decoding
the genetic code is the reconstruction of the program in experimental research,
beginning with a description of the output and finding out which part of the program
will cause certain changes step by step at certain temporal phases of the development
that are of significance for the genesis of the organic whole.
Even this metaphor has a weak spot. A computer program needs a programmer
and the computing machine requires complex electrical engineering. What lurks in
the background of the metaphor is again the tacit assumption of a final cause, but
final causes are excluded by the first abstraction. The consequence is that the genetic
code has to be understood as an explication of the category “formal cause” without
implying aspects of an explication of the category “final cause.” The deciphering of
the genetic cause is a task for the natural sciences, and as such, the deciphering in
experimental research, step by step of which part of the code will be the efficient
cause of a certain change in a certain phase of the genesis of the organic whole.
This explication of the formal cause implies, hence, a blind creative power of
organic nature, where “blind” means in the life sciences as natural sciences under
the first abstraction, that nothing can be said and ought to be said about a designer
and/or a purpose behind this creative power. A further problem is whether and how
this creativity can be reduced to the causal laws determining inorganic nature. What
can be said about this problem has to include a solution for the second problem, the
methodological problems implied in Darwin’s “theory” of the evolution of organic
species.
8.5 The Empirical Basis and Theories in the Life Sciences 251

The second problem (3.b) is the question of the possibility and the force behind
the development of species of organisms of different degrees of complexity out of
other more or less complex species of organisms. The idea that the specific forms
of the presently given different types of living beings is itself the product of a
development of life forms was beyond the horizon of religion and philosophy, and
even, except for some speculative attempts,115 beyond the horizon of the worldview
of the sciences before the second half of the nineteenth century. Darwin’s “theory”
is, in this respect, of at least the same significance for the development of the self-
understanding of humanity as the Copernican turn. More about this will be said in
Sect. 9.1. Darwin’s theory is a reconstruction of the history of organic life with the
aid of theories that have been provided by experimental research in the hard and the
soft sciences.
The “theory” would be a theory on the level of the life sciences—set aside the
requirements for theories in the hard sciences—if it were capable of discovering the
causes for the generation of different species of living organisms out of pre-existing
living organisms in experimental research. The first methodological question is,
hence, in what sense Darwin’s discoveries are confirmations of hypotheses. Already
famous scientists among the contemporaries, e.g., Virchow, had doubts whether
Darwin’s theory is really a theory in this sense or only a “hypothesis” because
there is no experimental evidence for the theory. Only experimental tests are able
to discover and confirm the causes behind the development of the different types
of living organisms,116 especially with respect to the development leading from
primates to humans. However, it is also not obvious in what sense Darwin’s “theory”
can be called a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an assumption about a causal relation
but Darwin’s “hypothesis” is, closely considered, neither a theory nor a hypothesis
in the sense in which these terms are used in the methodology of the hard sciences.
Hypotheses in the hard sciences are assumptions of strict causal laws written in
the language of a mathematical formalism, derivable from mathematical principles
and testable in experimental situations. There are also theories and hypotheses in
the soft sciences, e.g., a theory of certain types of diseases that are caused by certain
types of bacteria. A refined version of Mill’s methodology of the methods of induc-
tion is, as mentioned, sufficient for the epistemological analysis of experimental
research in the life sciences. A theory is in this case a collection of causal laws
that can be derived from general causal laws “written” in a natural language that is
enriched with a more or less complicated system of technical terms. Both types of

115
E.g., Schelling’s philosophy of nature.
116
Rudolf Virchow, professor for pathological anatomy and founder of the anatomy and pathology
of cells, was a member and leader of the Party for Progress (Fortschrittspartei) in the Prussian
Parliament and an opponent of Bismarck, but nevertheless also a defender of the sciences against
the teachings of the Christian churches in the so-called Kulturkampf, cf. Morkramer 2010, 124
quoting passages from Virchow’s speech in the Prussian parliament 1879. The struggle about
Darwin’s “theory” in Germany is a good example of the interplay of contingent and necessary
conditions in the history of science with some parallels in the present cultural disputes about
teaching in Darwinism in high schools in the United States.
252 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

theories are theories about causal laws, and the main task of research is the discovery
of causal laws by testing hypotheses about causal relations in experimental research.
The upshot is that, seen from the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology,
Darwin’s, “theory” is neither theory nor a hypothesis, but the reconstruction of the
natural history of the evolution of the species of organic life. A history is more than
a narration about sequences of events that can be observed in the present mentioned
in (3.a). As history, it presupposes, first, the description and classification of a huge
amount of phenomena that can be discovered in the life sciences, including fossils
as the presently given facts for historical research.
A history requires as a second step the determination of the age of the facts,
i.e., the period in the temporal sequence of past periods. The presupposition for the
determining the age of the facts for historical research presupposes the application of
theories about causal relations that must be borrowed from the hard sciences. What
was available at the time of Darwin in this respect was geology. In the meantime
more sophisticated techniques that can be used for determining of periods of the
past in the temporal sequence of the past have been developed.
The third step is the reconstruction of a past reality using the facts as traces of
events and states of affairs belonging to the past reality of a past period, e.g., the
past reality of the age of the dinosaurs. Such a reconstruction again presupposes the
application of theories borrowed for this purpose from the life sciences, but also
again ultimately from the hard sciences. A reconstruction of a past development
of events always has gaps that have to be closed with the aid of the discovery of
further facts able to fill the gaps. If and as long as such material is a “missing link,”
the gaps can be filled by assumptions about material that might be able to fill the
gaps. Such assumptions can be called hypotheses, but such hypotheses are historical
hypotheses. Such historical hypotheses refer to facts for historical research that
might be able to close the gaps in the history of evolution. Historical hypotheses
are confirmed if it is possible to discover facts that can close the gap, the “missing
link” in the reconstruction of a past development in the history of nature.
There is finally the task of the historical causal explanation of the more or less
significant reconstructed changes in the structures of organisms as concrete wholes
in the development of the history of organic life. Causal explanations require in turn
the application of more or less strict causal laws that are already established and
recognized. The basic paradigm of a “theory” for such explanations was at Darwin’s
time the “survival of the fittest” as a principle of natural selection together with
the somewhat cryptic assumption that the final purpose of “nature” was to create
something like that. The problem of this explanation is that “fittest” is not a precisely
defined term and admits several interpretations. Setting aside the obviously absurd
interpretation of “the fittest” as the “strongest,” especially in the Fascist version of
Social Darwinism, “fit” means to fit into the conditions of the natural environment
that is essential for the survival and procreation of organisms.
This explication of the meaning of “fittest” as a principle of natural selection still
has shortcomings. The first is that the explanation cannot be immediately derived
from a well-defined causal law that has been tested in experiments. Since it refers to
the relation of the organism to its environment, it is a mass term for a whole set of
8.5 The Empirical Basis and Theories in the Life Sciences 253

possible causal relations. In addition, the explanation is circular. The “fittest” is the
one who survives, and vice versa. What is left as a background for an explication
of the meaning of “fittest” is the everyday experience in the lifeworld that clever
people know how to adapt to circumstances and survive better that those who stick
to their old habits. Precisely this is the reason for the plausibility of the transition
from Darwinism as a theory of the life sciences to Social Darwinism.
The second and really serious shortcoming is that the principle of natural
selection is able to give dubious types of explanation for why certain forms of living
organisms perished in a changing environment and others survived, but it is not able
to explain why organic life is able to develop an increasing variety with an increasing
degree of complexity in the structure of organisms. In other words, the principle of
natural selection is not able to discover the moving force behind the development of
new forms of living organisms out of others.
Seen from the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology, Darwin’s dis-
covery, as already mentioned, is neither a theory nor a hypothesis. It is rather the
discovery that there is a natural history of the development of living organisms
beginning with microorganisms and ending with organisms, concrete wholes of an
incredible degree of structural complexity. Hypotheses in this context are historical
hypotheses that can be confirmed or disconfirmed with the discovery of additional
facts for the historian. Darwin’s “theory” is, furthermore, a history that is not able to
provide satisfying historical explanations for the historical changes that took place
in the course of the history of the evolution of organic species.
In the meantime the theory the genes and the genetic code has provided a way
to deliver the experimental evidence for the causal relations that can be applied in
the explanations of changes in the history of the evolution of organic species. The
causes behind such changes are changes in the genetic code, and these changes
can be explained by presupposing causal relations that have been confirmed in the
hard sciences. Thus, e.g., radiation is able to cause mutations in the genetic code.
It is an open question whether and how the genetic code can also be modified by
properties and abilities that have been acquired by individuals in their struggles with
a changing environment and natural selection.
The question whether or not the life sciences have to presuppose a creative force
behind the generation and corruption of organisms has been left open in the analyses
of the material ontological region of the life sciences and of the epistemological
structure of the methodology of the life sciences in (3.a). It has been left open
because it could be expected that the problem of the genesis of organic life forms in
a history of the evolution of the species of organisms in (3.b) would imply further
essential aspects of this question.
The first new aspect that surfaced in (3.b) was the problem of the creative force
behind the evolution of the species of organisms in the history of evolution. The
second aspect is the problem of the creative force behind the development, the
natural “history,” of the genesis of primitive microorganisms out of inorganic matter
beyond the history of the evolution of the species in the life sciences in a general
history of nature in general and its significance for the natural sciences in general.
More about that will be said in the next section.
254 8 The Structure of Theories in the Natural Sciences

A reminder has to be added. It is possible though by no means necessary to

assume some intelligent design behind this development, but this assumption is
not possible as a scientific thesis. Such an assumption is metaphysical because it
presupposes an entity that additionally determines a formal cause interpreted as
a final cause that cannot be given within the limits of the empirical basis of the
sciences. The reminder implies, however, that it is dangerous if seemingly innocent
metaphors that entail tacit references to final causality are used in the life sciences.
What is possible is the assumption that nature has the potential power to develop
organic life, given inorganic matter as a material ontological foundation along with
favorable circumstances, i.e., the power to develop entities with categorical forms
that are not reducible to inorganic matter. In other words, nature has creative power,
but this power is “blind.” What “blind” means in this case is that nature understood
as the intentional correlate of the cognitive attitude of the natural sciences excludes
purposes and conscious intentions; in short, nature is “blind” because final causes
are already excluded under the first abstraction that is constitutive for the cognitive
attitude of the natural sciences.
 Part IV
The Natural Sciences, the Historical
Human Sciences, and the Systematic
Human Sciences
Chapter 9
History and the Natural Sciences

9.1 The History of Nature and History as a Human Science

According to Neo-Kantian epistemology, ideographic description and understand-

ing is the medium of the human sciences in general, and especially of the historical
human sciences; in contrast the natural sciences are nomothetic, interested in the
discovery of universal causal laws and in the causal explanation of what happens and
has happened. Regarding the special case of history, this strict dichotomy between
the human and the natural sciences causes some problems. The first problem is that
it seems to be a flat misnomer and even absurd to talk about a “history of nature.”
The second problem is that this approach is not able to give an epistemological
justification for the significance of causal explanations, including the application
of causal laws borrowed from the natural sciences for historical research. A third
problem is that the dichotomy is not able to give a satisfactory account of the
interplay of methods taken from history as a human science and from the history
of nature in pre-historic research. Similar problems surface in the epistemological
analysis of the differences and affinities of the methods and the empirical basis of
the systematic human sciences on the one hand and the natural sciences on the other,
especially the life sciences. They will be considered below Sects. 10.1 and 10.2.1
Fixed life expressions given in the present are the facts for research in history as
a human science. Fixed life expressions are tools and artifacts in the broadest sense
on the level of lower understanding, while monuments including art works and texts
are fixed life expressions on the level of higher understanding. Historical research as
a reconstruction of a past reality presupposes progress in the interpretation of fixed

1
The theses of this section will be not only incompatible with the Neo-Kantian but also with the
Diltheyan strict methodological and epistemological separation of the natural and the human and
here especially with the historical human sciences. What will be said is, however, compatible
with Husserl’s reflections on the historicity of the primordial pre-givenness of the world. Cf.
Hua XXXIX, text 7, 540.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 257

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_9
258 9 History and the Natural Sciences

life expressions, but the interpretation of the life expressions also presupposes vice
versa the progress of the reconstruction of the past real lifeworld of the authors of
the fixed life expressions.
The reconstructions of historical developments presuppose a common temporal
framework. This framework is calendar time determined by the movements of
celestial bodies in a Galilean framework. This temporal framework is the presup-
position of the possible causal explanation of historical facts and events in the past
in general.2 Three “periods” can be distinguished in the history of nature: the history
of the universe, including the history of the formation of our solar system; the
geological history of our planet Earth; and the history of the evolution of organic
life on our planet. The history of the universe is the history of inorganic matter. It
is meaningless to apply the Galilean framework of calendar time in this part of the
history of nature. In this period of natural history the methodological order of the
reconstructions of the past and causal explanations of the past is reversed.
The Kant-Laplace theory of the origin and development of our solar system
is already a theoretical reconstruction presupposing the theoretical framework of
classical physics. It is, as such, a historical hypothesis that has to be confirmed
by subsequently discovered indirect evidence given in astronomical alongside with
astrophysical observations and possible confirmation in experimental research.
The theories of post-classical physics presupposed in a “history” of the universe
“starting” with the “big bang” indicate a much more complex framework. It is
questionable in what sense the emergence of the atoms of the elements can be
called a “history” that “happened” in Minkowski’s world points of the space-time
continuum of relativity theory.
The situation is different for the natural geological history of our planet and the
history of the evolution of organic life as a part of the history of our planet. The
Galilean framework can be used for determining temporal sequences and periods
of geological history and the history of organic life. The historical past is given for
historical research in the present, first in traces of past geological events and then in
the traces of organic life, i.e., fossils. The reconstruction of the geological past of
inorganic matter presupposes a description of minerals, ores, different types of rocks
and sediments, etc., but the reconstruction immediately implies causal explanations
based on causal laws that have been confirmed in the natural sciences.
The history of organic life on our planet is the reconstruction of the history of
the evolution of organic life, of the generation and corruption of different types of
organisms. The presupposition for the reconstruction is the understanding of fossils
as traces of past organic life and its past environments. This understanding is a first-
order understanding and not the second-order understanding, an interpretation of
the life expressions of Others in the present and in the past indicating their first-order
understanding of states of affairs, in the broadest sense, in their time. The first-order

2
The difference between historical narrations and myths is that the reports in historical narrations
refer to a certain time in the temporal sequence of a historical time that is filled with other
determinable events. This assumption is irrelevant for myths and mythological thinking.
9.1 The History of Nature and History as a Human Science 259

understanding of traces presupposes the first-order understanding of organic life,

i.e., all that is presently known about organic life forms in the life sciences. These
distinctions require further explications.
The organic life forms of the past are given in the present for research interested
in the history of nature because they left presently given traces of their existence: the
fossils. Presupposed for the understanding of the traces in paleontological research
are (1) the classification of the presently given different types of organic life forms,
their similarities and their affinities; (2) descriptions of presently given organisms
and their anatomy; (3) the understanding of the functions of the parts, the organs
of the organisms, for other organs of the organisms and for the organism as a
whole, i.e., the understanding of the functions as a complex web of reciprocal causal
conditions; and (4) the understanding of the reciprocal causal relations between the
living organisms and their environments.
Traces are understood as traces of organisms living in the past if it is possible to
reconstruct, given general knowledge of (1)–(4), to reconstruct the past organisms
and their environment. The general context for possible determinations of the time in
which the organisms existed is the Galilean framework of measuring time sequences
of the natural history of the planet. Geology provides the empirical material and the
causal explanations that are required for the reconstruction of the development of
the sequence of periods in this history. At the time of Darwin geological periods
were and still are the first indicator of the age of the traces, the fossils of organisms,
of their emergence and their extinction, and they still play this role. Meanwhile
modern physics and chemistry have provided other and more sophisticated means
for measuring the age of geological periods and the traces of organic life in such
periods.
The reconstruction of the development and the periods in the natural history
of organic life has, hence, a complex methodological structure. The life sciences
provide the knowledge about the general inner anatomical and physiological
structures of organic life forms, as well as classifications of organisms indicating
a system of kinships and different degrees of complexity. This knowledge has to be
applied to the reconstruction of the forms of organic life that left the presently given
traces of their existence. Geology, and with it, causal explanations taken from the
hard sciences provide the means for the reconstruction of the age of the traces and
the historical development of the different life forms. Geological knowledge applied
in the reconstruction of the history of the planet is in addition essential for the recon-
struction of the environment of the past lifeworld and the environmental conditions
of the emergence, flourishing, decay, and final extinction of the life forms.
The methodologies of history as a human science and of natural history are
different, but they nevertheless share partial aspects of their structures. (1) They
share as their main task the reconstruction of what was the case in the past, the
historical facts, with the aid of presently available material, the facts for historical
research. (2) This reconstruction presupposes a temporal framework, time given
in a Galilean framework. History as a human science and the natural history of
the evolution of organic life forms share the general Galilean framework for the
determination of the temporal phases of events, states of affairs, and developments
260 9 History and the Natural Sciences

in the historical past. (3) The reconstructions of events and developments in the past
that happened in geological history and the history of organic life require causal
explanations that have to be justified in the experimental research of the natural
sciences. History as a human science must at least admit such explanations in its
reconstructions of the development of past real lifeworlds.
There are, beyond these shared methodological structures, significant differ-
ences. Both the empirical basis of what is given in the present and can serve as
the material of the reconstruction of the past on the one hand and the methods of
the reconstruction on the other are different. The differences are, hence, differences
both of types of traces and of the intentional acts of understanding the traces. Traces
of the history of nature are (1) geological traces and (2) fossils. The traces of history
as a human science are (3) fixed life expressions. The understanding of (1) and (2)
is, as mentioned, first-order understanding. The understanding of (3) is second-order
understanding, i.e., interpretations of the meaning of the fixed life expressions of the
author, i.e., her/his first-order understanding.
It is necessary for an analysis of the relation of the methodologies of the
history of nature and history as a human science to say more about (2). The
facts for the natural history of the evolution of organic life are traces, i.e., the
fossils as traces of more or less complete material imprints of parts of organisms
in inorganic matter and traces of the activities of organisms, e.g., footprints. The
understanding of the traces as indicators of specific kinds of organisms is the task
of paleontology. Paleontology presupposes the reconstruction of the organisms, and
in the beginning this reconstruction presupposes in turn the descriptive knowledge
and classification of presently existing life forms and of the internal anatomical and
physiological structures of such life forms. This knowledge implies the knowledge
of the functions of parts of the organisms for other parts and for the organisms
as independent wholes. Knowledge of the functions implies an explication of the
partially reciprocal causal relations that determine the functions. The laws guiding
these causal relations have to be confirmed according to the methodological rules
of experimental research in the life sciences. It has also been shown above that
the methods used to determine the age and the temporal periods in which certain
organic life forms existed presuppose causal explanations applying causal laws that
have been confirmed in the hard sciences.
The understanding of traces, and in general the understanding of organisms in the
life sciences, is a first-order understanding. The understanding of life expressions
in general is second-order understanding, i.e., the interpretation of the meaning of
what is or was understood in immediate or fixed life expressions. The materials
offered by the empirical basis, i.e., the facts for the philological-historical human
sciences, are fixed life expressions. The sign matter of fixed life expressions are
traces of a past human activity but to recognize such traces as a sign matter
requires the possibility of giving an interpretation of the meaning of the signs. Fixed
life expressions including texts and monuments of art and architecture indicating
the contents of higher understanding, but also tools and artifacts as indicators of
elementary understanding, need the interpretation of what is meant in them, the
foreign first-order understanding that is encoded in them.
9.1 The History of Nature and History as a Human Science 261

To reconstruct this first-order understanding is the task of philological and

archaeological interpretation. Philological interpretations (and to a lesser degree,
the archaeological interpretation of tools, artifacts, and monuments supported by
philological interpretations) are able to reconstruct a quasi-temporal order of texts
and monuments. This quasi-temporal order is not sufficient by itself for the historical
reconstruction of a past reality. Beyond the interpretation of fixed life expressions,
history also requires the reconstruction of a past temporal development of a past
real lifeworld, including the events of the creation of the fixed life expressions
by their authors. This reconstruction presupposes calendar time in a Galilean
framework. This framework also includes, however, a past beyond the past that can
be reconstructed with the aid of philological-historical interpretations of fixed life
expressions, i.e., the past reality of natural history.
The presupposition of a Galilean framework for historical reconstructions of
past developments has significant consequences for the methodology of history as
a science. Fixed life expressions presuppose a sign matter and the sign matter by
itself is a trace. This means, however, that its age and place can be determined
with methods that are also used to determine the place and the age of traces in
natural history. What is required for such determinations are analyses of the material
structure of the sign matter with the aid of confirmed hypotheses of the natural
sciences. Paleography is able to use such methods for determining the age and the
place of the origin of the sign matter of texts. The same methods can be used for
the determination of the age and the place of the origin of the material that has been
used for works of art, architecture, tools, and other artifacts. This research work is, of
course, not of immediate significance for the interpretation of fixed life expressions.
It is, however, a legitimate part of the methodology of historical research because
the determination of the age and the place of origin in the past of calendar time in
the Galilean framework is a necessary presupposition for further historical research.
The determination of the time and the place of the origin of fixed life expressions
can then in turn be of significance for philological-historical interpretations of these
life expressions.
Even on the level of elementary understanding, the recognition of causal relations
and their application in explanations of what has happened already presupposes the
distinction between the past and future horizon of events in the present and of events
in a past present.3 The first task of history is the reconstruction of events and changes
in a past temporal sequence, but history is also interested in causal explanations of
what has happened in the past. Such causal explanations can be genuine causal
historical explanations if the causal laws are determined by the system of norms and
habits governing social life in a past reality. They are genuine historical explanations
because the knowledge of these laws presupposes the interpretation of the fixed life
expressions that have been created in the past reality.4

3
Cf. Sect. 3.5.
4
Cf. Sect. 6.2.
262 9 History and the Natural Sciences

Pre-scientific historical narratives have always applied both recognized causal

relations determining events in the natural environment and trivial secondary
understanding of the motives of actors in a pre-scientific lifeworld.5 The application
of such causal explanations is suspicious because both are determined by the
context of higher understanding belonging to the time of the historians who have
written such historical narratives. The causes of (a) relevant events in the natural
environment reported, e.g., in historical narratives written in pre-scientific contexts
of higher understanding, are the will and power of spirits, demons, the gods, or
God, and the effects are understood as punishments or rewards or miracles. Such
explanations are of interest for the historical reconstruction of the authors who
have written such histories, but not for the time in which the events happened. So-
called everyday psychology and understanding of motives of other persons is also
determined by the context of higher understanding of the historian, and it is always
a question for further scientific historical research whether the application of such
explanations has to be rejected as an anachronism.
History as a science in a lifeworld with sciences is able to replace the trivial
“psychological” explanations just mentioned with explanations taken from psychol-
ogy as a social human science. The problems of this application will be considered
in Sect. 10.1. History as a science in a lifeworld with sciences is also able to apply
explanations presupposing causal relations that have been discovered and confirmed
in the natural sciences. Causal explanations borrowed from the natural sciences
are necessary for the explanation of changes in the natural environment of a past
cultural lifeworld including changes that have been caused by human activities.
The methodological structure of such explanations presupposes their confirmation
in experimental research and has, hence, precisely the methodological structure
of causal explanations in the history of nature. Such explanations can be applied
in history as a science for the explanations of events in the natural environment
(including the human body) that in turn caused changes in the development of
a society. They can also be applied in explanations of systems of techniques and
technologies used in coping with the natural environment in a past real lifeworld.
For a phenomenological epistemology, the justification for borrowing such
explanations from the natural sciences is in the last instance the generative
foundation of the natural sciences in elementary understanding. The ontological
region of the empirical basis of history as a science is the structure of lifeworlds
in general, and elementary understanding of practical life is an essential part
of the ontological region of a lifeworld in general. History as a human science
is a science of interpretation. Interpretations in the historical human sciences
presuppose a methodological abstraction. This abstraction is implied in the first
canon of hermeneutics and its application in historical research. In contrast, the
first abstraction of the natural sciences abstracts from all human activities and their
goals and values and, hence, also abstracts from all interpretations in secondary

5
Cf. Sect. 6.4.
9.1 The History of Nature and History as a Human Science 263

understanding of this dimension of a concrete lifeworld in general. What is left is

the interest in causal relations within the natural environment in itself, i.e., nature in
itself, and the structures of experimental research.
History as a science and philological-historical interpretation are interested in
the authors of fixed life expressions in a foreign past lifeworld and its natural
environment. Thus they are also interested in the events in the natural environment
of past foreign lifeworlds and in possible explanations of these events taken
from the natural sciences. Such explanations are historical because they have
the methodological structure of explanations in natural history. Thus here the
justification additionally presupposes that a reconstruction of past real lifeworlds
in history as a human science cannot be completely separated from the history of
nature. History as a science is, seen from this point of view, a mediator between
the cognitive attitude of the scientific research presupposing interpretations and the
cognitive attitude of experimental research in the natural sciences. This thesis needs
further explication. A first step in this direction can be taken with a brief analysis of
the specific situation of historical research in pre-history.
The term “pre-history” can be misleading. Pre-history is not a history of the early
periods in the development of humankind in general, and it is also not a history
of early periods in the development of different cultural lifeworlds. Pre-historical
cultures are cultures without a written tradition. No texts are available for historical
research and the reconstruction of the past reality of such cultures. Available are only
traces of tools, artifacts, and monuments. The empirical basis of historical research
is restricted to archaeological interpretations.6
A further distinction is necessary. There are cultures without a written tradition
that have been or still are in cultural contact with cultures with a written tradition.
Such cultures are pre-historical cultures in the broader sense. More or less objective
descriptions of such pre-historical cultures are available in the literature of cultures
with a written tradition. Ethnological research as a discipline belonging to the social
sciences was and is able to produce reliable descriptions and reports about such
archaic cultures, but this window has almost completely closed in the last century.
Pre-history in the narrower sense is the history of cultures that lack a literary
tradition and leave no traces in texts of cultures that have a literary tradition.
The distinction between pre-historical cultures in the broader and in the narrower
sense is not of significance for the cultural structure of pre-historical societies
without a literary tradition. The distinction is only of significance for the structure
of the available empirical basis and the methods of historical research. Only the
fixed life expressions that are of interest for archaeology (monuments, tools, and
artifacts) are available in these cases. It has been shown in Part II, Sect. 5.3; that
archaeological interpretations of the higher understanding indicated in monuments
is limited if no texts are available. What can be interpreted are implicit references to
structures of elementary understanding in monuments, e.g., indicators of techniques

6
Cf. for what follows Sects. 3.4 and 5.1 above on pre-history and Seebohm 2004, §§16, 18.
264 9 History and the Natural Sciences

to determine the periods of the seasons with the aid of celestial phenomena that can
be reconstructed with the presently available astronomical scientific knowledge.
The methods that are available for the interpretation of tools must use pre-
scientific and scientific knowledge of the human body, of the material used for
manufacturing tools and artifacts, and of the natural environment of the pre-
historical culture for and in which the tools and artifacts have been used. Beyond
that, interpretation is restricted to comparative methods and the classification
of equal features found in the fixed life expressions of different pre-historical
lifeworlds, but also in ethnological information about cultures without literary
traditions.
The first task of history and pre-history is to determine the temporal distance of a
reconstructed lifeworld and of the fixed life expressions that must be interpreted
before they can be used for the purposes of the reconstruction. As mentioned
above, the determination of the age of fixed life expressions presupposes in
general a calendar time in a Galilean framework and is, in addition, able to use
methods “borrowed” from the natural sciences. The only hints given in fixed life
expressions for determining the temporal distance between a pre-historical past and
present historical research are artifacts and monuments that can be interpreted as
representations or instruments for measuring temporal distances with the aid of the
movement and the constellation of celestial bodies.
However, the unearthing of the fixed life expressions is also accompanied by the
unearthing of traces of the human and even humanoid organisms of the authors of
the fixed life expressions. Archaeology together with and also paleontology as a
discipline of the life sciences are both presupposed for the reconstruction of pre-
historical cultural lifeworlds. Like the history of nature in general the methods of
paleontology presuppose causal relations that have been confirmed in experimental
research. Pre-historical research in the early phases of historical developments is,
hence, in a grey zone between history as a human science presupposing interpre-
tations of fixed life expressions and natural history presupposing applications of
confirmed causal relations. The significance of causal explanations belonging to
natural history increases with the age of the pre-historical culture. The question
whether or not individuals belonging to a certain species of humanoid primates
or of the homo habilis or of the homo erectus are already humans is irrelevant
for epistemology. What is relevant is the decrease of the possibility of applying
archaeological interpretations and the increase of causal explanations belonging to
natural history in the reconstruction of past pre-historical lifeworlds.
The analysis of the determination of the age of fixed life expressions using
methods that are “borrowed” from the natural sciences indicates that historical
research presupposes in general and not only in pre-history the application as of
causal laws and, therefore ultimately of experimental research. Historical causal
explanations of events in the natural environment of past cultural lifeworlds also
presuppose in general the application of such causal connections. This is the case
for explanations of inventions of the new technologies, e.g., windmills that have
been of significance for the development of cultures with a written tradition as well.
Of significance for historical causal explanations are, furthermore, traces of human
9.2 Technology in a Cultural Lifeworld with Sciences and Instrumentalism 265

bodies of individuals and of social groups indicating, e.g., diseases or malnutrition

analyzed with the aid of material taken from the life sciences. The material for
the history of the lower (and usually illiterate) social classes of the society, a history
that is of basic significance for the historical development of a cultural lifeworld as a
whole, is usually also neglected in the literature of the educated classes. Thus in such
cases historical explanations presuppose precisely the methods of pre-historical
research.
The thesis that the methodology of historical research, historics, presupposes
and implies not only the methodology of the interpretation of fixed life expressions,
but also the methods of natural history, and with them the application of causal
connections that can be confirmed in the natural sciences, has two consequences.
The first is that a strict separation of explanation and understanding or of ideographic
descriptions and nomothetic theories does not hold water. History as a science is
interested in explanations, and there are explanations that presuppose, like natural
history, the application of natural laws offered by the natural sciences. What is
worse, the determination of the place of events (including the creation of fixed
life expressions in the temporal sequence of the historical development in the past)
requires once again the application of precisely the methods of such determinations
in natural history and their justification with the aid of experimental research in the
natural sciences.
The second consequence is a paradox. It can be said that there is a priority of
history, and that the historical spiritual world7 has priority over the world as it is
given in and for the natural sciences. It has this priority because epistemological
reflections presuppose reflections on what scientists do and have done. In short,
it presupposes the history of science. We ultimately know what natural science is
from the history of science. Conversely, however, we know what really happened
in historical time and why it happened only in a context that stretches into natural
history beyond the scope of human history, and the methodology of natural history
presupposes the experimental research of the natural sciences telling us how things
really are and not how they appear to us in this or that period of historical time.8

9.2 Technology in a Cultural Lifeworld with Sciences

and Instrumentalism

Quite apart from all differences in the evaluation of this situation, it is generally
recognized that the correlation between the natural sciences and technology as a
structural subsystem in the structure of a social lifeworld with natural sciences is of
essential significance for this lifeworld. It is also of significance for the special status

7
CF. Hua IV, section III, ch. 3 and elsewhere.
8
What lurks in the background is the paradox of subjectivity, cf. Chap. 10 below, esp. Sects. 10.2
and 10.3.
266 9 History and the Natural Sciences

of the natural sciences in the system of the sciences in a lifeworld with sciences. The
generative foundation of this socio-cultural situation is immediately implied in the
generative foundation of the natural sciences in elementary understanding. It has
been mentioned several times in Part III9 that the natural sciences use instruments.
They design instruments for their own theoretical purposes and are in addition able
to design instruments for practical purposes; this is the reason why the natural
sciences themselves can be understood as instruments, as technology.
This understanding of science under the perspective of utilitarian pragmatism
and instrumentalism has its ultimate justification in the foundation of the natural
sciences in elementary understanding. Elementary understanding is first of all
an understanding of instruments, tools, and systems of tools, as well as of the
techniques of the application of tools. A first step for a critical evaluation of this
justification presupposes a summary of the main arguments for the thesis that
the natural sciences are able to replace the idle speculations of the philosophical
ontologies found in the tradition.
According to the analyses of Part III the necessary conditions for the emergence
of science are as follows:
1. A developed pre-scientific philosophical ontology of nature either as an indepen-
dent theory or in connection with onto-theological theories;
2. Mathematical theories; and
3. Sufficiently developed knowledge of the ways to cause desired changes in
the natural environment, including the application of basic arithmetical and
geometrical techniques on the level of elementary understanding.
The attitude of the natural sciences toward its foundation in (1) is ambiguous. The
cognitive attitude of the natural sciences implies the rejection of the pre-scientific
philosophical theory of nature as false. This rejection also implies, however,
that science claims to be a theoretical discipline like philosophical ontology and
presupposes, hence, a distinction between the theoretical and the practical attitude
that is prima facie similar to the distinction between the theoretical attitude of a
philosophical ontology and the practical attitude of elementary understanding. The
natural sciences also apply a selection of modifications of philosophical ontological
categories: time, space, mass, movement, acceleration, and force, and with them the
category of efficient causality defined in terms of the other categories. The principle
of the modifications is that these categories must be explicable in “mathematical
letters.”
Three arguments have been used in epistemological and ontological philosoph-
ical reflections after the emergence of the natural sciences in order to support the
claim of the natural sciences to offer the “true philosophy of nature.” The first
argument is that the application of mathematical deductions in the true ontology of
nature – and even in onto-theological metaphysical philosophical reflections more
geometrico – is able to replace the endless disputes about the conceptual categorial

9
Cf. the remarks about technology in Sects. 8.1 and 8.3.
9.2 Technology in a Cultural Lifeworld with Sciences and Instrumentalism 267

distinctions and opposed theses in pre-scientific philosophy. The second argument is

that the methodology of the new scientific ontology is based on sensory intuition as
the source of the experience of reality and is, therefore, able to decide the disputes
between competing hypotheses with the aid of experiments and observations.
Natural science is, hence, able to promise progress in the ability of the sciences
to predict future events in nature and to give theoretically consistent explanations of
past events.
The third argument is that science is useful, i.e., science is able to produce as
a side effect scientific technologies that can be applied in practical life serving the
needs and desires of individuals, groups, and the social community as a whole. The
ability of the sciences to cope with the brute realties of the natural environment
was and is the most convincing argument for the acceptance of the natural sciences
in the economic, political, and last but not least military contexts of elementary
understanding in a cultural lifeworld with natural sciences.
The first two arguments defend the theoretical supremacy of the natural sciences
over philosophical theories of nature as meta-genres of higher understanding,
but there have also been epistemological difficulties. There was first the dispute
between empiricism and rationalism. Empiricists had difficulties giving satisfying
explanations of the application of mathematics in the natural sciences, while
rationalists usually had to rely on metaphysical idealistic assumptions.
The analysis of the methodology of experimental research and the application
of mathematical theories has solved some of the old problems, but it also created
new problems. Given the state of the art, the mathematical formalisms of relativity
theory and quantum mechanics are different. No universal mathematical formalism
is in sight from which the two partial formalisms can be deduced. It is, further-
more impossible to decide with the aid of experiments which of the competing
ontological interpretations of quantum theory represents the “true” ontology of the
wave/particles given as observable phenomena in experiments.10 What is left is
that the mathematical formalisms of the theories “work,” i.e., experimental tests of
predictions based on hypotheses confirming or falsifying hypotheses are possible.
A phenomenological analysis of (3) and the third argument is able to shed some
light on the difficulties of (1) and (2) and the first and the second argument. The
difficulty is the difference between the meaning of “theory” in ontological but also
in mathematical theories and the meaning of “theory” in the natural sciences. The
analysis has to begin with an extension and a final corroboration of what has been
said in Part III about the two abstractions that are constitutive for the cognitive
attitude of the natural sciences.11

10
Cf. above, Part III, Sect. 8.3. The difficulties of ontological interpretations of quantum mechanics
highlight the significance of instruments for the methodology of the natural sciences. No objective
and intersubjectively acceptable knowledge is possible if it cannot be proven that the instrument
warrants the objective validity of the information that can be gained with the instrument.
11
Cf. Sects. 8.1 and 8.2.
268 9 History and the Natural Sciences

The source of the natural sciences’ immediate contact with reality is, even
for analytic epistemological reflections, not individual but intersubjective sense
experience, in short, intersensory experience. Observations and descriptions of
relevant phenomena given in experiments and experimental situations must be
intersubjectively accessible. This requirement implies that experiments (and even
opportunities for favorable experimental situations) ought to be repeatable. A tacit
presupposition of these requirements is that the preparation of experiments requires
active manipulations determining a set of factors and adding a factor to the set of
defined factors, the initial conditions. Such interactions include the application of
instruments used not only for the preparation of experimental situations, but also for
purposes of the observation of phenomena given in experiments and experimental
situations. Scientific research presupposes, hence, not only intersensory experience,
but also repeatable interactions using instruments. Scientific research has, therefore,
its ultimate foundation on the level of the elementary understanding of practical
actions and interactions and tools. It shares essential structures with the search for
and the application of means that can be applied in elementary understanding for
the realization of certain purposes guiding the actions and interactions of practical
life.
The interest in realizing one’s own purposes, i.e., the fulfillment of needs and
desires in coping with the brute realities of the natural environment, determines the
cognitive attitude of elementary understanding.12 This interest is manifest as the
motive, the desire to realize a specific artifact in the broadest sense.13 Moreover, for
its purposes elementary understanding is (1) interested in the pre-given material
in the natural environment and the means that can be applied to produce the
desired artifact using the pre-given material. Elementary understanding provides,
hence, the knowledge of the materials and the means that are able to support goal-
directed practical social activities. Such means are bodily actions and interactions
in connection with such actions, often with the use of tools.
Elementary understanding includes, furthermore, (2) the experience and under-
standing of regular sequences of events, of causal relations in the natural environ-
ment that determine the favorable or unfavorable circumstances for the actions and
interactions of practical life. Such sequences are given in (2.a) the experience of
regular sequences in repeated circles, first of all the movements of celestial bodies
and the seasons; (2.b) the experience that an occurrence of events of the type x is
usually followed by events of type y, and (2.c) the experience of the sequence of
the emergence, genesis, decay, and corruption of forms of organic life including
the living bodies of consociates and one’s own body. It is known in elementary
understanding that all actions and interactions of practical life presuppose and
are dependent on the context of the regularities of the natural environment. This

12
Cf. Sect. 3.2.
13
For instance, the interest in the breeding of cattle.
9.2 Technology in a Cultural Lifeworld with Sciences and Instrumentalism 269

knowledge is, however, only of interest as the “handmaiden” of the interests of

the motives, desires, and needs of practical life together with the representation of
desired objects.
Elementary understanding is not interested in theoretical knowledge of nature
for its own sake. It is also not interested in theoretical knowledge about the
significance of practical actions and interactions in the context of the society in
and for a cultural lifeworld. Theoretical understanding of the norms for practical
actions and interactions in a cultural lifeworld and their justification, or even the
notion of nature as an independent whole behind the immediately given natural
environment of a cultural lifeworld, is higher understanding. Meta-genres of higher
understanding are religion, myths, poetry, theoretical philosophical reflections in
ethics and politics, and philosophical ontology. The ontology of nature is only a
part of general philosophical ontology.
The theories of the natural sciences have been understood from the beginning
as offering the true philosophy, the true ontology of nature that has to replace
the pre-scientific ontologies of nature. This claim can be misunderstood. What is
misunderstood is the difference between the cognitive attitudes of pre-philosophical
ontologies and the theoretical attitude of the ontology or later ontologies that can
be understood as interpretations of theories of the natural sciences. The difference
is a difference between two different meanings of “theory.” An analysis of the
differences in the two abstractions that separate the theoretical attitude from the
practical attitude of elementary understanding in the lifeworld is able to determine
the differences.
A philosophical ontology of nature abstracts from the experience of the practical
encounter with the natural environment in elementary understanding. The cognitive
attitude of elementary understanding implies generalizing and even idealizing
abstractions. The cognitive attitude of philosophical ontology has nature and being
in general as its intentional objects. The objects of generalizing abstractions are of
interest only if they are in addition objects of categorial intuition14 and explicable
in terms of categorial systems. It is this abstraction that separates elementary under-
standing and the understanding at work in the ontological systems of theoretical
philosophy as a meta-genre of higher understanding.15
The cognitive attitude of pre-scientific theoretical philosophical ontologies pre-
supposes, hence, an abstraction that not only excludes the practical activities in
social encounters that are of interest for practical philosophy; it also excludes all

14
Terms like “concept,” “categorial intuition,” “category,” “material essences,” “formal essences”
have to be understood in this investigation in the sense and only in the sense determined in Part I,
Sect. 2.3.
15
Practical philosophy is a theoretical reflection on practical social life in its own right and as a
normative system for actions and attitudes that are of significance for social relations, it is implied
in elementary understanding. However, it is not relevant for the elementary understanding of the
natural environment and the elementary understanding of actions and interactions in the encounter
and the struggle of practical life with the pre-given natural environment, and is therefore not in the
residuum of the first abstraction that is constitutive for the natural sciences in general.
270 9 History and the Natural Sciences

practical activities in the encounters of practical life with the natural environment,
along with the elementary understanding of the techniques of practical life used in
its struggle with the natural environment. This exclusion implies that philosophical
ontologies of nature are not applicable for the development of technologies that can
be useful for the elementary understanding of the natural environment.
As mentioned, the distinction between the first and the second abstraction is
not a historical but a systematic distinction of phenomenological epistemology.
Soft sciences presuppose only the first methodological abstraction. Hard sciences
presuppose in addition the second abstraction which is an abstractive reduction. The
first abstraction excludes the practical interest and values guiding elementary under-
standing. As mentioned in Part III what is left after the abstraction in the residuum
of the natural sciences is (1) first of all the immediate contact with the brute reality
of the natural environment in elementary understanding in intersensory experience.
The experience of elementary understanding is intersubjective because it has its
generative foundation in intersensory experience. The structure of the first-order
understanding of the objects in the medium of intersensory experience determines
and is manifest in the structure of the conceptual generalizing abstractions and the
system of categorial structures of the ordinary language of a cultural lifeworld.
Left are (2) partial aspects of the interest of elementary understanding in the
discovery of causal relations that can be applied in the techniques of practical life.
This search is on the level of elementary understanding, the haphazard game of
trial and error guided by “instinct,” i.e., associations, and by luck. Seen under
the abstraction of the cognitive attitude of a philosophical ontology of nature,
such causal relations are first of all efficient causal relations and, where organic
beings (animals and plants) are concerned, formal causes. The interest of elementary
understanding in formal causes is again guided by the desires and needs of practical
life. The search for such causal relations governed by the theoretical cognitive
attitude of the natural sciences further inherits from elementary understanding the
criteria for the decision whether or not an assumed causal relation or an assumed
quality of a certain type of matter is reliable. Such assumptions are reliable if it has
been shown that predictions of what will happen in the future have always been
confirmed in the past and can be confirmed again in the present.
The partial foundation of the natural sciences in elementary understanding
has further implications. Elementary understanding is in immediate contact with,
and has to struggle with, the brute reality of the natural environment. The main
weapons in this struggle are the means to modify the materials given in the natural
environment according to the needs, desires, and purposes of the social community
and these means are tools. Tools are themselves artifacts produced with other tools
and are parts of a system that includes tools, materials offered by the natural
environment, and the desired artifacts produced for consumption. A tool is a tool that
deserves its name only if it is a part of such a system in elementary understanding.
“Tools” used by animals usually do not fulfill these requirements.
An independent part of the whole system of practical activities in elementary
understanding in a pre-scientific lifeworld can be called a technique or an art, in
Greek technē or Latin ars. Tools in the sense defined can also be called instruments.
9.2 Technology in a Cultural Lifeworld with Sciences and Instrumentalism 271

A technique using instruments applied in practical life and given in elementary

understanding is recognized as a successful technique only because “it works.” The
theoretical question why it works is not of interest for elementary understanding.
The content of elementary understanding in a pre-scientific cultural lifeworld is
knowledge about techniques and about the significance of the techniques for a pre-
scientific cultural lifeworld, first of all their significance for economic relations.
The methodology of scientific research inherits from elementary understanding
the use of instruments for observations and for designing experiments. The use
of instruments is in this case guided by the theoretical interest in the discovery
of causal relations and explanations of natural phenomena but the requirement of
the methodology of scientific research is in addition the scientific justification for
the ability of instruments to provide objectively valid observations. On the level
of elementary understanding the use of instruments already implies intersubjective
validation, the intersensory evidence that the instrument works. What the scientific
explanation adds is the causal explanation of why the instrument works for theo-
retical and perhaps practical purposes. However, the discovery of such explanatory
laws require in turn the intersensory experience of the intersubjective community of
researchers, and this community has its foundation in elementary understanding.
Modern natural science has been understood from the very beginning as a
new and true philosophy of nature because the theories of the natural sciences
are based on mathematical principles. The natural sciences replace the unending
disputes between rival philosophical ontologies, e.g., in the Aristotelian, Platonic,
or Epicurean traditions, with the method more geometrico, i.e., the method of
deductive mathematical systems. A scientific theory is scientific only to the degree
to which mathematics is applicable in this theory. A perfect scientific theory is a
theory that is completely explicable in the language of a mathematical theory, and
this mathematical theory was initially analytic geometry and its extensions in the
infinitesimal calculus. This self-understanding was predominant in rationalism, the
second branch of early post-scientific philosophical epistemological reflections.
The second abstraction implies that the observables in experiments and exper-
imental situations that are accessible under this abstractive reduction must be
measurable. This requirement is fulfilled in the residuum of the first methodological
reduction only for mechanics. The second abstraction implies, hence, that all
theorems of scientific research on the level of the first abstraction must be reduced
to explications in terms of mechanics, be it Cartesian, Newtonian, or quantum
theoretical mechanics. Relevant in the residuum of the second abstraction are,
therefore, only efficient causal relations as forces that are explicable in terms of
measured space, time, mass, movement, and acceleration. Qualities of intersensory
experience given under the first abstraction must be reduced to explanations in terms
of observables that are still accessible under the second abstraction.
Both form per se and with it formal causes of organic entities have to be reduced
to a more or less closed system of partially reciprocal efficient causal relations. That
colors or sounds are effects caused by mathematically explicable efficient causes
can be, and has been, confirmed in experimental research and experimental tests
is, according to the first abstraction, the justification for the theories of the natural
272 9 History and the Natural Sciences

sciences and their claim to tell us the truth about the real things in themselves. That
the application of the category of causality to reductions of this type is not without
difficulties has already been mentioned, and it will be re-considered again.
The cognitive attitude under the first abstraction still admits the application of
pre-scientific philosophical ontological categories, first of all of the categories of
form or gestalt and of formal causality in the observations of the life sciences.16
They can be admitted because the intersensory empirical basis of this attitude is
still identical with the intersensory experience of elementary understanding. This
implies that pictorial representations are admitted in explanations of states of affairs
in the life sciences. Pictorial representations are admitted under the restrictions of
the first reduction. They are not admitted only under the restrictions in the residuum
of the second reduction. Theories under the second reduction must be explicable
in the language of mathematical theories. Added ontological interpretations are
possible but not necessary for the confirmation or rejection of hypotheses in
experimental tests. The only ontological categories that are admitted in the residuum
are mathematically defined counterparts of the original philosophical ontological
categories. Ontological categories are excluded from the residuum of the second
reduction if they do not admit explications in mathematical theories. The cognitive
attitude under the second reduction implies, hence, a wholesale rejection of the
categorial systems of philosophical ontologies based on categorial intuition.
The use of a system of instruments together with the theoretical explanation
of why the system’s instruments are able to achieve what they are supposed to
achieve is more than a technique of elementary understanding. It is a technology.
The progress of the natural sciences is, hence, immediately dependent on the
development of scientific technologies for the purposes of the progress of scientific
research. Beyond that, natural science is also able to explain why instruments that
have been used for the practical purposes of elementary understanding actually
work and to offer systems of knowledge about practically applicable efficient causal
relations. Natural science is able to develop systems of instrumentation that can be
used for the practical purposes.
Elementary understanding is, on the one hand, one of the factors in the generative
foundation of the natural sciences, but, on the other hand, after the emergence of the
natural sciences elementary understanding is in large parts no longer elementary. It
not restricted to the simple understanding of “how to” use techniques. It presupposes
technological understanding of the instrumentation used for practical purposes in
the context of a lifeworld with sciences, i.e., one that is no longer restricted to the
haphazard search for causal relations. The search can be guided by technology, and
technology is in this case an application of the natural sciences for the purposes of
practical life. Conversely, in this context natural science is not merely theoretical;
it also practical because it is possible to construct systems of practically applicable
instrumentation.

16
Cf. Sect. 8.5.
9.2 Technology in a Cultural Lifeworld with Sciences and Instrumentalism 273

The theories of both pre-scientific philosophical ontologies of nature and of

philosophical ontologies after the emergence of science are contemplative, i.e., pure
theories. Their cognitive attitude requires the abstractive exclusion of all practical
activities. In brackets are also practical activities that are guided by the interest in
discovering causal relations and properties of materials that are relevant as causal
conditions without having practical purposes in mind. This has consequences.
According to Aristotle the contemplative cognitive attitude of philosophical
ontologies of nature on the level of higher understanding is able to know the
universal, but it is not able to know the individual and individual events. In contrast,
the theories of the natural sciences know the universal, but they are also able to
predict individual events and to explain individual events that have happened with
the aid of experimental research. They are, hence, in this sense not only nomothetic,
they are also ideographic. Philosophical ontological theories know the universal
category of efficient causality, and they know in general that individual events
are determined in combinations of specific different efficient causal connections.
Theories of the natural sciences “know the universal” because they discover and
know universal systems of specific efficient causal relations.
Philosophical ontologies of nature are, therefore, neither interested in nor able to
develop techniques or technologies with the aid of instruments. Natural science is
able to discover technologies and to develop the instruments that are necessary for
technologies. The warrant of the objectivity of the discoveries and the knowledge in
the natural sciences is experimental research, and experimental research requires the
application of instruments and technologies. Natural science is able to produce this
type of knowing of the universal because it brackets only those purposes of practical
activities (and the values implied in these purposes) that are relevant for elementary
understanding. What is not in brackets is the interest of elementary understanding
in the discovery of causal relations.
Natural science has its foundation in part in elementary understanding, but also
in part in higher understanding. This creates tensions not only in understanding of
what natural science really is and what its value for laymen is, but also for the
self-understanding of scientists in a cultural lifeworld with sciences. A consequence
of this situation is the epistemological dispute between instrumentalists and the
defenders of the ontological relevance of the natural sciences as a true “philosophy
of nature.” Instrumentalism has its roots not only in the difficulties of providing
ontological interpretations of scientific theories in the hard sciences, but also in
the situation of the natural sciences and their significance for the development
of technologies in the context of cultural lifeworlds with sciences. A descriptive
account of this situation is of significance for a phenomenological analysis of
cultural lifeworlds with sciences in general, but it is also of interest for a critical
phenomenological account of the dispute between instrumentalism as an epistemo-
logical position and the defenders of the claim that natural science as an ontology
sui generis is a theory that tells us what nature really is.
Technology is double faced. Technology is a useful collateral benefit provided
by the natural sciences for society, but technology is also a necessary implement
of the methodology of the natural science. The common root of both aspects is
274 9 History and the Natural Sciences

that elementary understanding is one of the essential factors in the generative

foundation for the emergence of the natural sciences, and this foundation is of
essential significance for the epistemological status of the theories of the natural
sciences. This has consequences not only for the evaluation of the significance
of natural science in a lifeworld with sciences, but also for the epistemological
reflections of the instrumentalists.
Common sense is a cognitive attitude that in its judgments about meta-genres
of higher understanding is primarily guided by elementary understanding. The
touchstone of the value of meta-genres of higher understanding is whether they
are able to cope with the reality of the natural environment and/or to satisfy human
needs and desires. This implies that their value depends last but not least on their
ability to provide tools, i.e., instruments that can be used to introduce changes in
the course of events for such purposes. Natural science as a meta-genre of higher
understanding was and is in high esteem for common sense (at least as long as no
harmful side effects were in sight) because progress in the natural sciences promises
significant extensions of the practical ability to produce the desired effects with the
aid of technology.
Seen from this viewpoint, natural science is of crucial significance for the
development of the structures of social relations in a lifeworld with sciences: for
the economy, the distribution of political power, and the development systems
of law. The self-understanding of those who administer economic and political
power is on the surface determined by pre-given systems of normative ideas taken
from the tradition of religions, customs, and philosophical reflections on customs,
ethics, and politics, i.e., by “ideologies” belonging to different meta-genres of
higher understanding. In a lifeworld with sciences, however, groups administering
economic and political power are, however also well aware that progress in
technologies is a dominating factor for the progress of wealth, the distribution of
wealth in the economy, and the consequences of such changes for the distribution of
political and military power. They are interested in the progress of technology and
science for their own purposes.
This interest has consequences for the status of the natural sciences in the context
of the social world. The relation between the correlations of science/technology
and economy/politics is itself a correlation of a higher order in the social structure
of a lifeworld with sciences. The methodology of the sciences presupposes the
application of technology, and the progress of the natural sciences presupposes the
progress of the technology applied in the instrumental apparatus that is required for
experimental research. The degree of economic expense for the introduction of new
technologies that must be applied in the instrumental apparatus increases with the
degree of sophistication of the instrumental apparatus.
Thus on higher levels of its development, scientific research needs financial
support from the society and finally the state. The economic expenses can be
justified if it is reasonable to expect advantages for the economic and military
power of the state. Neither common sense, nor the economy, nor political leadership
9.2 Technology in a Cultural Lifeworld with Sciences and Instrumentalism 275

share the theoretical interests of the sciences in the progress of a truly scientific
“philosophy of nature” for its own sake without economically and politically useful
side effects. Scientists and the organized societies of natural scientists know this
and try to prove or pretend that their research will be useful for the well-being of
humankind, for common sense, and for the interest in an increase of the internal
and external political power of the state. They will be “quiet” about their own
satisfaction in discovering theories about the laws of nature as it is in itself.
The pragmatic attitude toward the natural sciences can be called pragmatic
instrumentalism and quietism. However, instrumentalism as an epistemological
position requires more. According to Galileo and Newton pre-scientific philosoph-
ical ontologies have to be replaced by natural science as the true philosophy of
nature. The first step of epistemological instrumentalism is that the cognitive attitude
of the natural sciences implies a wholesale rejection of the ontology of scientific
theories. Only mathematical principles are of interest for the natural sciences and
the progress of the natural sciences. The analyses of Part III, Sects. 8.3 and 8.4,
have shown that there is no immediate need for added ontological interpretations
of the mathematical formalisms applied in the theories of the hard natural sciences.
Experimental research is able to prove that the theory “works,” and this is enough.
This first step, the elimination of ontological interpretations, is followed by the
next step. Mathematics was already understood in the techniques of elementary
understanding as a tool, an instrument used for practical purposes, and not as
a theory of a realm of ideal objects. Modern mathematical formalisms can be
understood as operations with symbols. Such free activities creating consistent
(and if possible, complete) systems have, however, significance and meaning for
empirical sciences only if they can be used for precise definitions of hypotheses that
can be confirmed or disconfirmed in experiments. A confirmed hypothesis can be
used in predictions and explanations, and the ability to predict and explain is nothing
more and nothing less than the ability to be applied in technologies.
The critique of instrumentalism against the claim of Platonism and intuitionism
that mathematics is able to achieve objectively valid knowledge of an ontological
region beyond the regions of empirically accessible objects must be distinguished
from the instrumentalist critique of ontological interpretations of the application of
mathematical formalisms in the hard sciences. The answer of a phenomenological
epistemology to the instrumentalist interpretation of mathematics has already been
given. Furthermore, it has been shown that mathematical theories of classical
physics immediately imply an ontological interpretation because the mathematical
formalism applied in classical physics refers to mathematical idealizations, and
mathematical idealizations admit quasi-pictorial representations.
The situation is different in post-classical physics. Post-classical physics pre-
supposes mathematical formalisms that belong to extended algebra, and such
formalisms do not admit of quasi-pictorial representations. Ontological interpreta-
tions of the theories of post-classical physics are possible only per analogiam. The
additional difficulty of quantum mechanics is that at least two competing ontological
276 9 History and the Natural Sciences

interpretations are possible. According to the analyses of phenomenological episte-

mology, the root of the difficulty is that the theory itself denies the possibility that
the instruments that have to be used in experimental research are indeed able to
warrant objectively valid descriptions, because the instrument is itself a part of and
a causal factor in the observed quantum system. Mathematical formalism as a part
of the mathesis universalis17 has to be understood as a meta-physical interpretation
on the level not of a material, but of a formal ontology.

17
Cf. Sect. 8.3.
Chapter 10
History and the Systematic Human Sciences

10.1 Between Interpretation and Observation: General

Methodological Problems of the Systematic Human
Sciences

The center of the research interest within the systematic human sciences is the
present system of social structures, first of all in economy, law, and politics, along
with the interpretation of the first-order understanding of social interactions and of
the self-understanding of the participants in these interactions in different systems of
social structure. Social structures in the immediate past horizon of the present social
world and at a larger historical distance are of interest for the systematic human
sciences only to the extent in which they are of significance for the interpretations
and explanations of events and developments in the present social world.
Some remarks about terminological questions are necessary before turning to the
general epistemological controversies concerning the systematic human sciences.
Psychology was a discipline of theoretical philosophy before the advent of empirical
psychology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Empirical psychology
was widely understood as experimental psychology and as a branch of the natural
sciences in the nineteenth century. Dilthey introduced understanding psychology as
a branch of the systematic human sciences. For Stumpf and later Husserl psychology
was as phenomenological psychology a descriptive discipline.1 The question is
whether a phenomenological psychology is able to include both experimental
psychology and understanding psychology and to bridge the gap between them
or whether it is just another term for understanding psychology.2 Economics,

1
Cf. Sect. 4.2.
2
Cf. Sect. 10.3.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 277

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_10
278 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

law, and politics have been philosophical disciplines that belong to pre-scientific
practical philosophy, i.e., philosophical reflections on purposes, values, and norms
for actions. It will turn out in the following sections on the social sciences that
this system of first-order higher understanding in pre-scientific philosophy is still
compatible with the phenomenological analyses of the division of the disciplines of
the systematic human sciences.
Dilthey distinguished between the systematic human sciences and the historical
human sciences. Schutz’s term for the systematic human sciences is social sciences.
Psychology is the basic discipline of both the historical and the systematic human
sciences in Dilthey’s system of the human sciences. For him understanding and
descriptive psychology is first of all individual psychology. However, for Schutz’s
“understanding sociology” psychology is first of all relevant as social psychology.3
Of interest is how the systems of social interactions determine the activities and the
first-order understanding of the interactions of the participating individual persons.4
Dilthey’s term “systematic human sciences” will be used as a general term for
psychology and the social sciences in the following investigations. It will turn out
in the following sections that Dilthey’s and Schutz’s prima facie different positions
regarding the status of psychology in and for the social and the human sciences in
general are compatible within the framework of the phenomenological analyses of
the formal and material ontological structures of the region of the systematic human
sciences.
Epistemological reflections on the systematic human sciences have to begin with
an analysis of a basic methodological controversy about the epistemological status
of the systematic human sciences at the beginning of the last century. The empirical
systematic human sciences emerged as late bloomers in a cultural lifeworld with
sciences. Thus from the outset, the present in which the systematic human sciences
are interested is the present of a cultural lifeworld with sciences. Scientific research
interested in pre-scientific cultural lifeworlds is restricted to the methodology of
empirical historical research, and within certain limits to ethnological research. The
immediate epistemological consequence is that the systematic human sciences can
be recognized as sciences only to the degree to which they are able to apply the
methods of the already established natural sciences or the philological-historical
sciences. One of the main tasks of the following investigations is to show that this
consequence was and is misunderstood if the “or” here is understood as an exclusive
“or.”
The answer of the positivistic and analytic epistemologies was that systematic
human sciences can be recognized as sciences only to the extent to which they are
able to apply experimental methods and, if possible, mathematical refinements of
these methods. The empirical basis of psychology and sociology are observations
of present phenomena. Such observations have an open future horizon and admit,

3
On Schutz’s “social psychology” and its relation to the social sciences, see Embree 2003, 2008a.
4
The significance of social psychology for the social sciences and vice versa will be considered in
detail in Sects. 10.3 and 10.4.
10.1 Between Interpretation and Observation: General Methodological. . . 279

therefore, predictions. The possibility of predictions implies the assumption of

possible applications of analogues of the methods of the natural sciences, first of
all the methods of experimental research, and then the application of mathematical
models in predictions and hypotheses that have to be tested in experiments. This
answer has serious shortcomings but it is, nevertheless, partially correct.
The answer of the defenders of the independence of the human sciences was
that the systematic human sciences are independent because empirical research
in these sciences presupposes communications between the researchers and the
“objects” of research, other persons belonging to an intersubjective community that
includes the researcher. Research in the systematic human sciences presupposes
secondary understanding of life expressions of other persons and has to apply a
methodology of interpretation, not the methodology of experiments and explanation
governing the natural sciences. Psychology is understanding psychology, sociology
is understanding sociology, etc. This answer is again partially correct, but also has
serious shortcomings.
Considering the first horn of this dilemma it is obvious that a descriptive
analysis of basic epistemological structures of the empirical systematic human
sciences already indicates that observations in these sciences refer to events and
states of affairs that are given in the actual present and its future horizon. It is,
therefore, plausible to expect that the empirical systematic human sciences are able
to use at least analogues of the methods of experimental research that have been
developed in the natural sciences. However, this expectation has to cope with some
methodological difficulties.
It is essential for the general significance of the controversy that traces of
its impact surface even in the background of disputes in the phenomenological
literature. According to Felix Kaufmann, differences in the methodologies of the
social sciences and the natural sciences are only differences (1) in the degree of the
precision of predictions and the reliability of empirical methods for the confirmation
or disconfirmation of theorems, and (2) in the spatial and temporal realm of the
universality of the theorems. Kaufmann rejected the thesis that these and/or other
differences can be derived from differences in the ontological structures of the
world of the natural sciences and the social world. In the context of Kaufmann’s
investigations, this rejection has to be understood as a rejection of Dilthey’s and
Rickert’s strict separation of the human sciences as sciences of understanding and
the natural sciences as sciences of explanation. The problem that Kaufmann’s
position is also incompatible with the position of Husserl and Schutz will be
considered below.5
A brief summary of what Kaufmann had to say about the differences of the
degree of precision and the restricted reliability of predictions is necessary because
his results will be presupposed in the following sections.

5
See Kaufmann 1944, 174, 180ff; and Reeder 1991; 42f, 46, on Kaufmann.
280 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

(1) Given the degree of complexity of organic wholes and their relations to their
environment, even in the life sciences it is already difficult and sometimes
almost impossible to determine all or at least most of the initial conditions
in experimental situations. The consequence is that most of the causal laws
that can be discovered in the life sciences are statistical causal laws. The
methodological problems of experimental research in the life sciences are,
hence, a fortiori also problems for the systematic human sciences because
systems of social interactions and of the first-order understanding of social
interactions are structures of second-order wholes of even higher levels of
complexity. Their smallest independent parts are individual members of the
society, and as such are already organic wholes in the formal sense. The
structure of social communities is the structure of a hierarchy of levels of
wholes of the second-order beginning with small groups of different types, e.g.,
families and clans, and ending on the top with structures of different types of
states and relations between states. The degree of complexity for experimental
situations increases with the degree of complexity of the formal structures of
social wholes. The consequence is that the statistical causal laws and predictions
in the systematic human sciences will be increasingly weaker with the increase
of the complexity of the type of social communities and the relations between
different social communities of the same or different type.
(2) The structure of the system of possible causal interdependencies that is relevant
for predictions in the hard sciences has not changed in the period of natural
history that can be measured within a Galilean framework. But changes, even
sudden revolutions caused by external factors in the natural environment,
have happened frequently in the evolution of organic life. And the known
“evolution” of systems of social interaction in the last 10,000 years is a period of
increasingly rapid changes. Even well-confirmed estimates about the relevance
of certain factors for causal relations in social interactions in the system of the
social structures of a society 500 years ago6 are not applicable in the present,
and those that are applicable in the present may will be misleading in the
near future. It is always possible that predictions will be overthrown by the
sudden emergence of new factors in systems of social interactions that have
not previously been taken into account, e.g., unexpected events in the natural
environment, the invention of new technologies, new intercultural contacts, etc.
Turning to the second horn of the dilemma of phenomenological reflections,
what has been said in this respect about Rickert and first of all about Dilthey in
Sect. 4.2 must be kept in mind. Of significance for the methodical approach of this
investigation is first of all that the epistemological reflections on the methodology
of the humans sciences in general carried out by Husserl and Schutz, on the
one hand, and by Kaufmann, on the other hand, are prima facie incompatible.
Kaufman denied, as mentioned above, that there are any ontological differences

6
And at a geographical distance in other continents, e.g., in China.
10.1 Between Interpretation and Observation: General Methodological. . . 281

behind the differences in the methodologies of the natural and the human sciences.
Husserl as well as Schutz maintained that there are essential differences in the
cognitive attitudes of the natural sciences and the human sciences, including the
systematic human sciences. Social relations are social interactions. Human actions
and interactions are guided by in-order-to-motives, i.e., in Husserl’s terminology, by
purposes and values. It is precisely purposes and values, i.e., the lived experiences
in which objects on states of affairs are given as desired and valuable as well as the
immediate givenness of other persons along with the understanding of their lived
experience of other persons, that are all in brackets after the first methodological
abstraction.7
Kaufmann admits that the methodology of the social sciences presupposes
the “schemes of interpretation” of Max Weber and that these schemes imply in-
order-to-motives, but he says nothing about the methodological problems of such
interpretations. The region of research of the systematic human sciences is for him
the psychophysical region. This psychophysical region can be understood with a
grain of salt as a counterpart of the lifeworld in Husserl and Schutz. The difference
between Kaufmann and Husserl/Schutz is that nothing on the abstractive reduction
that is required for the step in question (i.e., the step leading from the attitude in
which the concrete lifeworld is given to the attitude in which a world is given as
the correlate of the natural sciences) can be found in Kaufmann’s reflections on the
psychophysical region. Given such reflections, some ontological categories that are
of essential significance in the lifeworld would be in brackets after the abstractions
that are constitutive for the cognitive attitude of the natural sciences.8
Except for occasional references to schemes of interpretation and in-order-to-
motives, nothing about a methodology of interpretation in the social sciences can
be found in Kaufmann. But in spite of the differences just considered between the
approaches of Kaufmann and Husserl, nothing about the methodology of interpre-
tations in the historical and the systematic human sciences can be found in Husserl.
Schutz offered a detailed methodological analysis of schemes of interpretation,
called by him ideal types and later constructs. His methodological analyses admit
an explication and justification of the specific nature of predictions and explanations
based on causal relations among the social relations interpreted in the systematic
human sciences and will be considered in detail below in Sect. 10.4. Nothing is
said, however, about how criteria of objective validity of interpretations based on

7
On Husserl’s theory of the abstractive reductions determining the ontological region of the natural
sciences and the concrete lifeworld, see Sect. 8.1 above and Hua IV; §18d and g; Hua VI, §§2, 8–
10, 66. On understanding and empathy see e.g., Hua IV 93ff; cf. Seebohm 2013.
8
Kaufmann admits that the social sciences need Weber’s schemes of interpretation, i.e., ideal types,
and that they imply understanding of in-order-to-motives, but insists that social facts have to be
constructed out of psychophysical facts in the way characterized above, cf. Reeder 1991, 43f.,
referring to Kaufmann 1944, 177–179. The main point is predictability, and with it degrees of
empirical falsification.
282 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

pre-scientific secondary understanding and first-order elementary understanding are

possible in the systematic human sciences.9
According to Husserl’s investigations a phenomenological analysis of the under-
standing of other persons in the lifeworld causes no further epistemological
problems because this understanding has the character of an intuitive empathy.10
This assumption is misleading. The process of mutual understanding in the present
lifeworld requires successful communication. Communication can be disturbed by
not-understanding and misunderstanding. The real problem is, hence, the problem
of the pre-scientific methods (and, beyond that, perhaps a scientific methodology)
for the elimination of not-understanding and misunderstanding.
It will turn out to be useful to have a look back (1) on the significance
of causal explanations in history11 and (2) on the methodological problems of
interpretation and reconstruction in the historical human sciences before the next
section embarks on a systematic phenomenological analysis of the epistemological
problems mentioned above.
(1) A brief comparison of the relation between the “systematic” experimental
natural sciences and the history of nature on the one hand and of the relation
between the systematic and the historical human sciences on the other can
shed some additional light on the problems of prediction and explanation in
the human sciences. The reconstruction of past developments of nature in
geological history and the history of the evolution of organisms along with
the determination of the past time in which this or that happened and why
it happened at this time, presupposes the application of causal explanations.
These causal explanations presuppose generalized conditionals referring to
causal relations that have been discovered and confirmed in experimental
research in a present after the explained past event. The sum total of such
confirmed generalized conditionals is methodologically presupposed in the
reconstructions of a history of nature.
In contrast, the methodology of history as a human science, i.e., the
philological-historical method, by no means presupposes results of research
in the systematic human sciences. However, historical research is able to
apply confirmed causal conditionals borrowed from the natural sciences for
the determination of the past temporal phase and the geographical place of

9
Schutz is first of all interested in the objective meaning contexts of ideal types. The problem
of the secondary understanding and then interpretation of subjective meaning contexts remains
in the margins, see Embree 2015, chapter 11 on meaning and there especially the references to
PSW (Schutz 1967) 247; CP I, 6, 58; CP IV 206. Schutz mentions in passing the correlation
of interpretation and application in jurisprudence Schutz 1967, 138 in the context of a quote
from Kelsen, cf. also Sect. 10.6 below. The problem behind the problems of pre-scientific
secondary understanding and interpretations of foreign life expressions lurks in the background
of disinterested observations, cf. below Sect. 10.2.
10
On understanding and empathy see, e.g., Hua IV 95ff; cf. Seebohm 2013.
11
Cf. Sect. 6.3–6.5.
10.1 Between Interpretation and Observation: General Methodological. . . 283

fixed life expressions and their authors, and history is also able to use causal
laws borrowed from the natural sciences in causal explanations of historical
events. The separation between the cultural horizon of the interpreter of the
fixed life expressions of authors in a distant past and these authors’ cultural
horizon, a separation required by the first canon, does imply on the one hand
restrictions on attempts to apply confirmed hypotheses about human social
behavior in the present in historical explanations. There are, in the contrary,
no theories in the social sciences referring to society as a whole on the level
of economics, politics, and law that do not presuppose references to results of
historical research. The immediate object of the systematic human sciences is
the present social world and the present implies immediately in its past horizon
includes not only contemporary history but also history and historical research
in general. Theories in the social sciences can be criticized, even refuted, if they
presuppose mistakes in the reconstructions of what happened in a past social
reality.
(2) A short reminder about what has been said in Part II, Sects. 5.3, 5.4
and 5.5 about the presuppositions of objectively valid interpretations in the
historical human sciences can be helpful for focusing the special problems of
a methodology of interpretations in the systematic human sciences. Fixed
life expressions and traces are the empirical bases for the reconstruction
of what happened. No aspect of what really happened in the past is given
in the actual present of intersubjective temporality.12 What happens in
the actual present or in the immediate past horizon of the actual present
is given for some members of a society in immediate observation. What
has been observed by somebody in the past horizon of the actual present
can be reported in the actual present, and there might be traces in the
actual present of what has happened in the past horizon of the actual
present.
It is possible to investigate what is/was the case without being restricted solely
to fixed life expressions and traces. History is able to find causal explanations for
what happened but except for genuine historical causal explanations,13 history is
not able to discover causal relations that can be applied in historical explanations.
Such discoveries require confirmations in experimental tests that apply the causal
relations in predictions. The present of what has happened is a past present. It is
meaningless to predict events that have in fact already happened in the past future
of a past present as effects of events of their causes given in this past present.14

12
Cf. ch. II, esp. §§7 and 9.
13
Cf. Sect. 6.4.
14
It is meaningful to predict, given certain reconstructed events in a past present, that certain other
events can be reconstructed in the future horizon of this past present. But this prediction is not the
prediction of an event. It predicts that new material can be available that admits the reconstruction
of the event.
284 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

History is, hence, only able to borrow the confirmed causal relations in its causal
explanations from the natural sciences.
Considerations about the epistemological problems of interpretation in the
systematic human sciences have been postponed at the end Sect. 6.5, because
research in these sciences requires research about contemporary social develop-
ments and share, therefore, the epistemological problems of contemporary history.
Contemporary history presupposes interpretations of fixed life expressions, but also
of immediate life expressions in the present and its immediate past horizon. An
epistemological analysis of contemporary history must, hence, face a problem that
is not relevant for the methodology of the historical reconstructions of a distant
past reality. This distance admits the separation of the present horizons of the
reconstruction and the past present horizons of the reconstructed historical reality.
In Sect. 5.5 the issue was whether the methodological abstraction implied in
the first canon of interpretation can serve as a criterion for the objective validity
of interpretations in contemporary history was negative. The answer was, that
interpretations of fixed life expressions of authors of a foreign past are reproductive.
Interpretations of life expressions as the process of eliminating not-understanding
and misunderstanding in communications in the present are productive. In the latter
case of the elimination of misunderstanding and not-understanding in communica-
tion is an open-ended process in the future horizon of present communication.15
It is, hence, impossible for contemporary history as well as for the systematic
human sciences to apply the abstractive reduction that is constitutive for the
historical human sciences to the epistemological problem of objectively valid
interpretations in present communications. The disadvantage of the systematic
human sciences is that for them there are no methodological criteria that can serve
as warrants of objective validity of interpretations of present life expressions and as
warrants for the possibility of interpretations of human scientists as interpretations
of “disinterested observers.” The advantage is that they have immediate access to the
observation of life expressions of consociates in their social and natural environment
in the present, its past, and its future horizon.

10.2 Interpretation and Prediction

The empirical basis of the systematic human sciences is not a specific region of
objects given in the concrete lifeworld that can be determined by an isolating
abstraction. Their ontological region includes the structure of the concrete lifeworld
as a whole. The disciplines of these social sciences are different because they
are interested in different aspects and not in separable regions of the lifeworld. A
phenomenological epistemology must, therefore, start with an analysis of possibly
different aspects in the formal and then the universal material ontological structure

15
Cf. Sects. 3.2 and 3.5.
10.2 Interpretation and Prediction 285

of the lifeworld in general,16 aspects that are of methodological significance for both
the historical and the systematic human sciences.
Presupposed for such analyses are the formal ontological distinctions between
the system of relations between the independent parts of higher-level wholes of the
second order; between the internal systems of relations of the independent parts of
this whole; and finally between the independent parts on the lowest level. Wholes on
the lowest level are organic wholes, “organic” understood in the formal ontological
sense that has been explained in Part I, Sect. 2.2. The two main perspectives for
further analyses in this context are, on the one hand, the perspective focusing on
the system of relations connecting the parts, and ultimately the parts of the lowest
order in wholes of a higher order; on the other hand, there is the perspective that
considers how these relations are one-sidedly founded in certain properties of the
parts and add vice versa certain properties to the ensemble of properties of the parts,
especially to the independent parts of the lowest level.
Relations between the independent parts of a lifeworld as a concrete whole are
social interactions and systems of social interaction, which implies on the lowest
level interactions between individual persons (and groups of individual persons)
with the natural and social environment in their concrete lifeworld. The perspective
focusing on these systems of relations is the perspective of the social sciences.
Social sciences are interested in the structures of systems of social interactions, i.e.,
social institutions. Of essential significance for the structure of concrete lifeworlds
is that these systems of social interactions and their foundations in practical social
interactions with the natural environment are given for the individual persons in
first-order elementary and higher understanding. The perspective focusing on the
subjective aspect of first-order and second-order understanding of social interac-
tions and the natural environment is the perspective of psychology.
What is understood in secondary understanding in general and then in the inter-
pretations of psychology is on the lowest level the lived experience of Others given
as animate bodies. The object of the second-order understanding of understanding
psychology is the first-order understanding of individual persons and groups of
their natural environment, including their own bodies and their social environments.
Social psychology as a branch of understanding psychology is the interpretation of
the first-order understanding of the system of social interactions of the individual
persons and groups of individual persons who participate in the social interactions
as the intentional objects of this first-order understanding.
The social sciences are interested in focusing on the objective aspect, i.e., not on
the intentional acts, but on the types of intentional objects in this structure. Research
interested in a theory of the types of first-order understanding of social interactions
and of the natural environment of the participants in interactions presupposes
research interested in theories of the structures of these interactions and vice versa.
What has been said is the answer that can be given on the level of a formal
ontological and then material ontological analysis of the whole-part structures of

16
What follows is a summary of the main viewpoints that have been considered in Sect. 2.2.
286 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

the lifeworld in general to the remarks of Schutz and others about the problem of
the relation between social psychology and sociology.17
Epistemological investigations interested in descriptions of what scientists really
do18 have to admit that research in the systematic human sciences presupposes as
its empirical basis life expressions, i.e., actions and interactions realizing certain
purposes and/or verbal communications. Life expressions can be understood or
misunderstood or not-understood. The systematic human sciences must, therefore,
apply methods for the interpretation of life expressions. However, this material basis
is given in present observations of life expressions, interactions, and the encounter
with the natural environment in elementary understanding, and in the experience
of the blind power of the reality of the natural environment in systems of higher
understanding, first of all in religions. The present always implies a future horizon,
and with it, possible expectations and predictions.
The systematic human sciences are, hence, also interested in predictions. Beyond
that they are even able to apply at least analogues of the methods of experimental
research because the first-order understanding of actions and social interactions of
the participants in interactions already implies a first-order understanding of causal
relations on the level of pre-scientific understanding of a concrete lifeworld.19 Of
significance in this respect is that the lived experience of Others as other living
bodies is the foundation for all higher levels of second-order understanding and
that it is originally given in an associative transfer as the lived experience of other
animate bodies. Under the first abstraction of the natural sciences animate bodies
considered as organisms admit the application of experimental methods in the life
sciences.20
This will have consequences for the methodology of experimental psychology.
Of significance is, furthermore, that the systematic human sciences are sciences
of the present, and for the human scientists this present is the present of a
lifeworld with sciences though this is not true for their objects in all cases, e.g., in
ethnology. The natural environment in such a lifeworld is given as an environment
for technologically guided practical social interactions, and this implies that it is not
given only as a natural environment, but also as the independent nature in its own
right as the universal correlate of objects for the natural sciences.21
Closer considerations will reveal further epistemological difficulties. What has
been said is, however already sufficient for the suspicion that the classical dis-
tinction between the human sciences as sciences of understanding and the natural
sciences as sciences of causal explanations and predictions does not hold water
for present interpretations of the present first-order understanding of present social

17
Cf. Embree 2008a; and Schutz 1967, 248, 199.
18
This is in contrast to an interest in the normative question, what they ought to do according to
epistemological theories a priori; cf. Sect. 7.2!
19
Cf. Sect. 3.5.
20
Cf. Sects. 8.5 and 10.3 below.
21
Cf. Sect. 10.1.
10.2 Interpretation and Prediction 287

interactions by the participants in interactions. This suspicion has implications for

the systematic human sciences in general that need further clarification before
considering their weight and significance in the different branches of empirical
research in the systematic human sciences.
There is a general agreement that the conceptual constructions used in the
methodologies of the social sciences have to be developed out of the structures of
social interactions that are given in lived experiences in the lifeworld.22 In terms of
the typology of understanding this means that they have to be developed out of the
pre-scientific secondary understanding of the first-order elementary understanding
of social interactions by the participants in these interactions. The analysis of the
empirical basis of the methodical constructions must, hence, begin with an analysis
of the structures of first-order elementary understanding of social interactions in
the pre-scientific lifeworld. The epistemological justification for the thesis that
interpretations in the systematic human sciences require conceptual constructions or
ideal types presupposes an analysis of the empirical basis of such conceptualizations
in pre-scientific first-order and second-order understanding of social interactions.
The process of mutual understanding in social interactions in the present
lifeworld requires successful communication. The misunderstanding and not-
understanding of life expressions can be discovered and eliminated in the future
horizon of the process of communications The elimination of not-understandings
and misunderstandings is, hence, a process not of reproductive but of productive
first-order elementary and then of secondary understanding.23 A brief recapitulation
of the basic structures that have been considered in Part I, Sect. 3.5, Part II, Sect.
6.4, and Part III, Sects. 8.1 and 8.5, is necessary for the analysis of the possible
discovery and elimination of misunderstanding and not-understanding and of their
foundations in expectations about events that can be confirmed or disconfirmed
in the future horizon of the temporal structure of first-order and second-order
understanding of social interactions.

22
Schutz and others often use “natural attitude” as the correlative to “lifeworld,” but “natural
attitude” is used in Husserl as the counterpart to the transcendental-phenomenological attitude
(Einstellung) presupposing the transcendental phenomenological reduction. Simply to follow
Schutz in this respect causes some problems. What does it mean to say that the mathematical
entities of higher algebra, including imaginary and complex numbers or functions determining
world points in four dimensional spaces with curvatures and their application to phenomena as
objective correlates of mathematical methods in the hard sciences given in the natural attitude, are
given in the lifeworld? There are according to the results of Sects. 8.2 and 8.4 neither in Husserl’s
nor in Schutz’s nor in Gurwitsch’s publications satisfying analyses of the specific epistemological
problems of post-classical mathematics and post-classical physics. What can be said is that the
intentional objects of higher algebra are given in types of lifeworlds with natural sciences and
formalized mathesis universalis. However, such objects are not given in pre-scientific lifeworlds
and, hence, not in the lifeworld in general. An analysis of structures of the lifeworld requires
analyses of the generation of these structures.
23
Cf. Sect. 2.4. It is of significance for the following analyses that first-order understanding of
interactions implies in addition possible partial or complete agreement and disagreement, and as a
consequence the partial or complete disruption of interactions.
288 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

Predictions of events presuppose causal connections between events such as

explanations of events in the past horizon. The temporal structure of the primordial
sphere and then of intersubjective lived experience is already determined on the level
of elementary understanding by causal relations in expectation and disappointment.
The basic ontological category of the regional ontology that determines what can
count as an object for the hard natural sciences in the residuum of the first and the
second abstraction is a pre-formation and generative foundation of efficient causality
in pre-scientific philosophical ontologies. The cognitive attitude of the life sciences
presupposes only the first abstractive reduction and can, therefore, admit in addition
analogues of the formal causality of pre-scientific ontology.
Essential for the systematic but also for the historical human sciences are in-
order-to-motives, purposes guiding the direction of actions and interactions toward
the realization of their objects, and values as properties of the objects or states of
affairs that are pre-given as purposes. Bracketing other implications of the meaning
of the ontological term “final cause” in pre-scientific philosophy, the term can
be used for substructures of goal-directed social interactions and their objective
correlates, which can be understood as one-sided foundations of the dependent parts
just mentioned: motive, purpose, and value.
(1) Final causes are given for the participants in the interactions on the level
of first-order elementary understanding in practical social interactions and can be
communicated in an elementary secondary understanding of the participants that
is itself a dependent part of the interaction. Since final causes are understood
as the guiding principles of a sequence of present interactions, final causes are
also understood as the reason behind the expectations of the participants that the
interaction will be able to realize the final cause. If such predictions fail, the first
reaction of the participants will be the assumption that there have been errors in
(2.a) the selection of the actions in the sequence of the interaction realizing the final
cause, because it is the final cause that determines this sequence, or (2.b) the trust
in the willingness or ability of the participants to act as required in the sequence
of actions in the interaction.24 The actions themselves are already understood as
efficient causes on the pre-scientific level of lived experience in the encounter with
the natural environment.25 The justification for such expectations of elementary
understanding is that actions that have always been efficient for the realization of
a final cause will be efficient once again in future work toward the same or similar
final causes.
Two levels of the lowest level of secondary understanding can be distinguished.
(1) Already the cooperation of the participants in simple social interactions requires
occasionally secondary understanding in communications between the participants
of social interactions. (2) The whole context of social interactions is given from
the inside for the participants in elementary understanding, but it is also given from
the outside for contemporary observers that are not immediately involved in the

24
For reasons that will become clear in the following sections. (2.a) can be called the economic
and (2.b) the civil or political and legal aspect of social interactions.
25
Cf. Sect. 9.2.
10.2 Interpretation and Prediction 289

interaction. The phenomenological analysis of (2) is of essential epistemological

significance for phenomenological analyses of the methodology of the systematic
human sciences.
Contemporary observers are interested in the secondary understanding of “what
is going on” in the interaction. They want to understand what is understood in
the first-order understanding of the participants, but they can also be interested in
the subjective how of the understanding the lived experience of the participants.
The empirical basis for their understanding of the observed sequence of actions
is the sequence of life expressions of the participants in the interaction. The
process of secondary understanding of contemporary observers is, like secondary
understanding in general, always accompanied by possible not-understanding and
misunderstanding. In cases of not-understanding it is natural for pre-scientific
secondary understanding based on observations to ask the participants in the
interaction, why they are doing what they are doing. An answer about the “what”
will usually indicate information about the “why” and with it the in-order-to-motive
(the purpose as the final cause of the interaction), and in addition information about
the interactions providing means, i.e., the effective causes for realizing the purpose,
(the because-motive).
To refer to the distinction between the subjective meaning of an action and its
social context on the one hand and their objective meaning for an observer on the
other is misleading. An onlooker can be, and usually is, involved in the context of
acts in interactions. The “objectivity” is restricted by concrete practical and social
interests.26 It is not very helpful to add that the onlooker or observer ought to be
disinterested in the social actions of the actor. Without further specifications such
an onlooker would be either guided by idle curiosity or restricted to an empty
stare. Scientific observations are interested. Their interest in the human sciences is
precisely the objective validity of the interpretation of the action or life expression.
But this explication of the meaning of “disinterested onlooker or observer” is
obviously circular.
The questioning of participants in social interactions causes, however, serious
difficulties for observers who want to be disinterested contemporary observers in
every respect. It was and is a generally accepted methodological principle of the
systematic human sciences that observations of social interactions and the secondary
understanding of social interactions ought not to be involved or interested in the
social interactions. The difficulty given with this methodological requirement is
that research in the social sciences and in social psychology needs communication
between the researcher and the objects of research.
Schutz’s postulate of adequacy requires that the terms and the constructs or ideal
types used in the social sciences for analyses of social actions ought to be reasonable
and understandable for the actors and their contemporaries.27 An attempt to find

26
This distinction of Max Weber was rejected by Schutz; cf. Embree 2000a, 84ff. Schutz CP II,
275; cf. 227. On Weber, see also Grünewald 2009, 108 and 135.
27
See Embree 2015, ch. 10, and there especially the references to CP II, 85 and V, 36.
290 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

out whether the construct is understood requires participating in communications

via diagnostic questionnaires or in interviews about the “why” and “how” of their
interactions, and such ventures are always in danger of ending in a dialogue about
the further question why it is good, pleasant, reasonable, etc., to realize such
purposes and such values in social interactions. The observer who participates in
such dialogues has become an interested observer.
The methodological problem for the disinterested observer in the context of the
systematic human sciences is, hence, first of all to avoid an engaged dialogue with
the actors who are the objects of the research. What can be said after the preceding
epistemological reflection is that the disinterested observer is only able to save this
status if the questioning of participants is restricted to inquisitive and diagnostic
questions first about their in-order-to-motives and then about their because-motives,
i.e., their applied knowledge about the means for realizing their purposes guiding
their in-order-to-motives. This difficulty will be considered below.
Attempts to determine the limits of the secondary understanding of disinterested
observers presuppose the analysis of further essential aspects of the process of the
secondary understanding of social interactions. The discovery of misunderstandings
of social interactions is the correlate of disappointed expectations about the course
of events on the level of pre-scientific secondary understanding. Several cases of
such situations can be distinguished.
Hypotheses about the outcome, the final cause of a course of events in a social
interaction, can be confirmed or disconfirmed in the course of events regardless of
whether the hypothesis has a background in the observer’s previous experiences in
the lifeworld or whether it has been tentatively introduced in an attempt to eliminate
not-understanding. The disconfirmation or confirmation of the hypothesis about the
events is in this case not separable from the confirmation or disconfirmation of the
assumed secondary understanding of the purpose of the observed social interaction.
Except for a special case that will be considered below, it is essential for the second-
order understanding of observers of social interactions that misunderstandings
are discovered if expectations and predictions about the outcome of the finished
observed social interactions is disconfirmed, and with it the observer’s secondary
understanding of the purpose of the social interaction. The immediate result of the
disconfirmation of second-order understanding is a not-understanding, and the next
task is to propose a new hypothesis that can be used in future observations of certain
social interactions.
It is, of course, possible that answers of participants in social interactions are
hiding the real in-order-to-motives of their interactions. Such complications can
include special problems for psychology, but they can be neglected in a preliminary
outline of the methodological problems of understanding in the systematic human
sciences in general. Relevant are cases in which there is complete agreement
between the observer and the participants in understanding the purpose of the
interaction, but in which expectations about the outcome of the social interaction
are disconfirmed for both because in the process of the realization of the final cause,
the purpose of the interaction has been interrupted.
10.2 Interpretation and Prediction 291

For the first-order elementary understanding of the participants the disconfirma-

tion implies the assumption that something went wrong. Possible referents of the
“something” are factors that have been assumed to be efficient for the realization of
the final cause. Two different species of such factors can be distinguished: natural
factors, i.e., efficient causes connected with unexpected changes in the natural
environment or malfunctioning tools and techniques, and social factors, i.e., efficient
causes connected with unexpected changes in the action and behavior patterns of
participants in interactions.
In such situations the task of secondary understanding is to understand the
attempts of first-order understanding to find and eliminate “what went wrong.”
Secondary understanding is able to follow observations of the life expressions of
the participants, including their answers to diagnostic questions, without further
difficulties in the case of natural factors (including malfunctioning of the bodily
actions of the participants) if observer and observed share the same empirical basis
of intersensory experience on the level of practical social interactions.
Finding and eliminating social factors lies at a higher degree of complexity. In
this case elimination means “correcting” the patterns of actions of the participating
individuals, and on the level of first-order understanding the standards for such
corrections has already the tendency to end up in disputes, in dialogues about what
is right and what is wrong, what can be admitted and what has to be prohibited.
A restriction to the inquisitive questioning of participants without being drawn into
the context of such dialogues is difficult. The secondary understanding of observers
will end up in difficulties if the participant’s answers refer to contexts of higher
understanding, to more or less trivial “myths,” or to religious or philosophical
contexts that are used to explain the failure, but also the success, of efficient factors
in social interactions. Communications between observer and participants in social
interactions as consociates in such cases will again end up in a dialogue.
The only way out is a protocol documenting what the participants said; then
the observer must try, if possible with the aid of other fixed life expressions, first
of all texts,28 to apply the philological-historical method under the first canon
of hermeneutics. This is, however, a transition that leads beyond the temporal
structures of observations of contemporary social events in the strict sense.29
Only certain characteristics of essential structural aspects on the highest level
of universality of the ideal type “social interaction” have been considered in

28
On other fixed life expressions cf. the beginnings of Sects. 3.2 and 3.4. It is and always has been
a question of the available technologies for the kinds of fixed life expressions that can be produced
in a cultural situation, and every new invention in this field will require the development of new
methods for adequate interpretations of such new types of fixed life expressions.
29
In the last two centuries technology has offered ways of producing new types of fixed
life expressions beginning with photographs and records to videotapes; such inventions cause
additional methodological difficulties for the systematic human sciences and for contemporary
history. It is easy to manipulate such “sources” for attempts to reconstruct “what is or was really
the case.” Required are new methods of “critique” for these new types of “historical” sources and
these methods will have to use results of the natural sciences.
292 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

the preceding analyses. Methodological analyses of the different branches of the

systematic human sciences will have to deal with specifications and modifications
of this universal structure. The main task was to indicate that the discovery of
misunderstanding in the second-order understanding of contemporary observations
of social interactions is a correlate of the disconfirmation of predictions about
events.
Secondary understanding and interpretation of first-order understanding of events
on the one hand, and prediction of future events on the other and therefore also
explanations of past events are inseparable in the process of first-order and second-
order understanding of social interactions in the present. This result of the preceding
analyses can count as an explication and justification of Felix Kaufmann’s position:
the phenomenology of meaning is not an autonomous sphere of knowledge, because
interpretation is a synthesis of internal and external experience. Social facts must
be constructed as psychophysical facts.30
It has already been mentioned that Kaufmann’s position is prima facie not only
diametrically opposed to Rickert’s and Dilthey’s separation of explanation and
understanding, but also to Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of the difference
between the natural and the human sciences after Ideas II, and this means after
the analyses of the methodological abstractions that are constitutive for the natural
sciences. It is also obvious that Husserl and other phenomenologists after him
accepted Dilthey’s dichotomy of the natural and the human sciences, and beyond
that, even a priority of the human sciences over the natural sciences.
It is, however, questionable whether either this self-interpretation of transcen-
dental phenomenology or the significance of the theory of the methodological
abstractions for a phenomenological epistemology of the natural and the human
sciences is compatible with the thesis that the structures of the lifeworld are the
foundation for all possible cogitative types of a higher order. Schutz presupposed
the priority of the lifeworld in his investigation of the social world. Accepting this
thesis together with what has been said about the basic structures of the lifeworld in
Part I, Sect. 3.5, of this investigation it must also be presupposed.
Even on the lowest levels of the generative foundations of first-order elementary
understanding the structures of lifeworld imply already the elementary understand-
ing of efficient causal relations and also final causes. Causal explanations in a
concrete pre-scientific lifeworld refer first to in-order-to-motives of purposes and
values as properties of objects before turning to questions about the understanding
of effective causes, i.e., because motives. The question “why are they doing that” has
priority over the question “how are they doing that.” Final causes in this sense are
the principles of the selection and the temporal order of the application of efficient
causal relations in the realization of purposes following in-order-to-motives.
It is, hence, possible to defend Kaufmann and to insist that the ontological region
that is pre-given for research in the systematic human sciences is psychophysical and
that the psychic cannot be given by itself without the physical. Using Kaufmann’s

30
Cf. Reeder 1991, 44f. on Kaufmann.
10.2 Interpretation and Prediction 293

terms, it is not the task of Husserl’s second methodological abstraction to separate

the psychic from the physical. The task is, on the contrary, an abstraction that
brackets the psychic including purposes, etc., in order to thematize the physical, i.e.,
nature as correlate of the cognitive attitude of the natural sciences, in the residuum
of the abstraction. However, the abstraction itself has its generative foundation in
the givenness of nature as the natural environment, i.e., as a dependent part in the
psychophysical unity of the lifeworld.
For the theory of the abstractive reduction what is called “psychic” in Kaufmann
is the structure of a final causality and its parts and relations: purposes, in-order-
to-motives, values, and with them other persons that manifest these motives in
their actions as their life expressions. Bracketing the psychic in the abstractive
reduction implies, hence, bracketing final causality. What is left in the residuum
of the ontological region of the natural sciences is efficient causality, and in the life
sciences formal causality remains as well.
Presupposing that hypothetical interpretations can be tested and disconfirmed
as correlates of predictions about causal connections in the lifeworld, it is now
possible to return to the postponed problems connected with the cognitive attitude of
“disinterested observers” in the systematic human sciences. Much has been said in
defense of the possibility of such observers and about the requirements they have to
fulfill. The shortcoming of the defenses is that they are restricted to considerations
about the requirements for the subjective attitude of individual researchers that must
be fulfilled for the possibility of “disinterested observation,” and even what is said
about this aspect is rather dubious.
The main question is whether the relation between research and practical
application of the results of this research can be the same in the systematic human
sciences, in the natural sciences, and in history as a science. The structures of
the cogitative types of observations that are relevant for the systematic human
sciences are (1) the specific temporal structures of the givenness of the empirical
basis of the observations and (2) the specific structures of the intentional “objects”
of the observations. These objects are (2.a) given for research as contemporaries,
and this givenness happens in direct or indirect communications between the
observers and their observed “objects.” However, (2.b) the “objects” as well as
other contemporaries are not only able to react to questions of the researchers in
unexpected ways, but are in addition able to react to “published” results of empirical
research in the systematic human sciences. Such reactions are, therefore, immedi-
ately added conditions to the set of initial conditions that have to be determined
for methodologically viable predictions and explanations in the empirical sciences.
Some further reflections are necessary to clear this ground.31
It is beyond question that here “disinterested” can only mean “disinterested in
practical participation in social interactions.” Research in the empirical systematic

31
The prediction of economists that a certain set of transactions in the market will lead to falling
profits for the participants in the interactions will change the behavior of the participants at the
very moment at which they receive the information about the prediction.
294 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

human sciences does indeed require a theoretical interest in actions and interactions.
It is, however, also necessary to keep in mind, that the distinction between the
theoretical and the practical is already relevant for the theoretical reflections of
practical philosophy. Such reflections are interested in the ethical values of actions
of individuals and of economic and political social interactions. They are not
interested in generalized conditionals that admit predictions of the effects of certain
actions and social interactions.
Observations in the empirical natural sciences can be recognized as “disinterested
observations” precisely because the natural sciences are theoretical empirical
sciences. They are disinterested theoretical observations only because the residuum
of the abstractive reduction brackets precisely the categorial structures that are
characteristic for practical interests in general and therefore also for interested
observations. It is, furthermore, meaningless for the ontological region of the natural
sciences to assume that natural scientists can be tempted to ask their objects (e.g.,
planets, minerals, plants, magnetic waves, etc.) whether they agree or disagree with
the scientists’ understanding of their interactions, e.g., in the solar system.
Left for the search for an answer to the question of what it might mean that
research in the systematic human sciences requires disinterested observations is,
hence, to ask what it might mean that research in the historical human sciences
is “disinterested” in the outcome of its reconstructions and interpretations of a
past reality. A reference to the application of the first canon of hermeneutics as a
methodological principle for the reconstruction of historical events at a historical
distance is sufficient for the justification of the claim that historians can be
“disinterested” interpreters of a reconstructed past reality. The canon implies that
the historical distance separates the horizon of the interpreter and the horizon of the
authors of the interpreted life expressions.
The epistemological analysis of the methodology of historical research can
justify the claim that historical researchers ought to be disinterested “observers”
and “interpreters” in their interpretations of fixed life expressions and their recon-
structions of the lifeworld of predecessors in a distant historical past. The first canon
implies a methodological abstraction that is, like the methodological abstraction of
the natural science, constitutive for the distance between researcher and research
object. For precisely the same reason the historians also not able to conduct inquisi-
tive interrogations and ask the predecessors about their first-order understanding of
their social interactions and their purposes.
Prima facie, it seems to be an advantage of the systematic human science
over the historical human sciences that for the systematic human sciences, imme-
diate communication with the “objects” of research in the present is possible.
Misunderstandings in the process of secondary understanding of participants in
social interaction can be at least partially discovered with the aid of disconfirmed
predictions that are implied in the misunderstandings. The disadvantage is that it
is impossible for interpretations of life expressions with authors in the present to
separate interpretation and application. The horizon of the interpreter will always
be of immediate significance in such communications. The “objects” of obser-
vation and/or understanding are “subjects,” contemporaries, and even consociates
10.2 Interpretation and Prediction 295

belonging to the social horizon of the “disinterested” observer; they share the
present of the researcher and in general of a research project of a science that is
theoretically interested in them as subjects and in their social interactions.
In the systematic social sciences there is only one requirement for “disinterested
interpretations” that has the character of a straightforward methodical rule and does
not depend on the training of psychic ability to eliminate prejudices and ideologies.
Though the observer (i.e., in this case the interpreter), cannot avoid communication,
she/he has to avoid all temptations to get involved in a dialogue with the objects of
research going beyond the limits of inquisitive and diagnostic questioning. But the
real difficulties for the requirement that observers and/or interpreters must remain
“disinterested” or “not involved” are implied in the formal ontological and material
ontological structures considered in the beginning of this section. They are relevant
for (1) the research activities of systematic human sciences and (2) the significance
of the theories of the systematic human sciences for the future development of the
social and cultural community in the lifeworld.
(1) It is sufficient to consider the partial structure “observation of an object,”
including communication in diagnostic questioning of the “object” in the
present of the second-order whole of social relations in a concrete social
lifeworld. The meaning of “disinterested” cannot imply that the observer has
a standpoint outside this structural whole like the standpoint of historians in
the reconstruction of a past social lifeworld. Since the conceptual framework
of research in the systematic human sciences presupposes the structures of pre-
scientific social life, all observations and interpretations in the systematic social
sciences will be determined by this context and the context of the presently
dominating theories in the systematic human sciences. The inquisitive dialogue
with the “objects” will, therefore, necessarily include “suggestive” questions.
It is possible to reduce this impact of the horizon of interpreting research in
the systematic human sciences if the structure of the social interaction under
investigation is comparatively small and admits distance between the context
of the social interaction and the context of the interpreter. It is impossible, i.e.,
determined by the ontological structures of temporality and of the givenness of
others in the lifeworld as a second-order whole, if the context of the system of
social relations under investigation includes the whole of the social lifeworld or
large parts of it. Even approximations to an analogue of a separation between
interpretation and application in historical research are impossible in such cases.
(2) There is, finally, the problem that the results of social research can be efficient
factors causing changes in the structure of social interactions and social
institutions. The problem of research in the systematic human sciences is
that the scientists are not only involved as researchers in a specific type of
communication in the present with participants in social interactions, but are
also involved in communications about their interpretations and theories, with
their contemporaries as “objects” of their theories and not only with other
scientists in the field.
296 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

This has immediate consequences for the status of the interpretations and the
theories of specific types of social interactions in the systematic human sciences in
the context of the present lifeworld. The interpretations of the systematic human
sciences have an immediate impact on the “objects” of the theories if they are
“published,” i.e., known by contemporaries who share the present social context
with the researchers and the objects of their research. The interpretations are, hence,
able to cause changes in the social behavior of individuals, and therefore also in the
structure of parts of the present system of social interactions. Since the theories of
the systematic human sciences are theories about contemporary social interactions
and their significance for their development in the future, they are necessarily of vital
interest for the objects of the theories, the participants in the social interactions.
This recognition presupposes communication between the theoreticians and
their objects, and begins with the publication of theories that imply predictions of
future socially relevant developments. Such predictions usually immediately imply
recommendations32 for social actions guided by the purpose of avoiding unpleasant
consequences and promoting pleasant consequences in the future horizon of the
social interactions that have been analyzed in the sociological or psychological
theories. The consequence is that the “published” theories themselves appear as
factors that are able to introduce changes in the system of social interactions. Thus
the epistemological requirement of “disinterested observation and interpretation”
is not only impossible because a separation of interpretation and application is
impossible. It is also impossible because theories in the social sciences cannot have
the character of pure theories unaccompanied by any practical interests.

10.3 Psychology

As already mentioned in the formal ontological reflections of the preceding section,

psychology is the perspective that is interested in the first-order and second-order
understanding of social relations and of the natural environment of social relations.
This perspective includes in addition the lived experience of Others as animate living
bodies. A phenomenological epistemology of empirical psychological research
must, therefore, presuppose the general structure of a phenomenological psychol-
ogy, i.e., precisely not an empirical psychology,33 as well as the phenomenological
analysis of the correlation of primordial subjectivity and intersubjectivity that was
considered in Part I, Sects. 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5.

32
The recommendations are implied in statements like: “If x is done, then y will be the case”; “If
x is not done, then y will not be the case.”
33
Cf. the discussion of the problems of the relation between phenomenological and empirical
psychology and phenomenological psychology and transcendental phenomenology in Ströker
1997, ch. V and VI. A phenomenological investigation that is primarily interested in psychology
as a science is Drüe 1963.
10.3 Psychology 297

For phenomenology, the immediate object of an epistemological analysis of

empirical psychology is the general structure “individual person” given in eidetic
intuition. The primordial subject is given in this analysis as an abstraction that
brackets all contents of the lived experience of individual persons that presuppose
the givenness of other persons in a common natural and social environment
of an intersubjectve community. The passive primordial subject is affected and
determined by its hyletic field as the field of a blind reality that is not yet understood
as a world of intentional objects given in intentional acts. The formal structure of this
field is determined by two systems of dimensions. The first system of dimensions
is inner temporality, with its center in the primordial actual Now and its dimensions
in the horizons of retentions and protentions. The second system of dimensions is
the system of inner spatiality and its separation of the inner Here of the primordial
living animate body and the manifold Theres outside the body including the living
body itself as given not only from the inside but also partially from the outside.
On the level of animalic understanding, the givenness of the own body is already
the passive foundation for the givenness of other living bodies including other
persons and intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity is in turn the foundation for the self-
givenness of the primordial subject as an individual person, i.e., as a member of a
social community. As a member of the community the individual subject is able to
distinguish between pre-given contents as intentional objects that are independent
real or ideal objects as intersubjectively given objects, on the one hand, and its
private representations including illusions, on the other.
The past is present in memory. A personal “history” presupposes reproductions.
Reproduction presupposes memories as its material content. The emergence of
memories of contents that are stored in the continuum of retentions is determined
by passive associative syntheses. The givenness of contents that are identifiable
intentional objects and states of affairs that can be serially ordered reproductions
of a personal “history” presupposes the intersubjectivity of the givenness of such
objects and a serially ordered, intersubjective temporality. The consequence is
that the “history” is a history of the past experience of an individual person as
given in her/his memories. Such experiences are the presupposed foundations of
possible explicit reproductions. The “historical” reports of such reproductions are
intersubjectively accessible.
These structures are pre-given a priori for a phenomenological epistemological
analysis of the methods of empirical psychological research. The steps of such
an analysis are (1) the analysis of the foundations of the cognitive attitude of
psychological research in the a priori structures of the pre-scientific givenness and
self-givenness of individual subjects; (2) the analysis of the empirical basis of
the different dimensions of psychological research; (3) the analysis of the general
structures of methods and theories applied in psychology; and (4) the analysis of the
different aspects of the applications, the “technology” of psychological research in
a cultural lifeworld with sciences.
(1) A person is given for another person as having a body and the body appears
as the body of a person because it is the “sign matter” of the immediate
298 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

present life expressions including verbal life expressions. On the level of

elementary understanding, life expressions can be understood or misunderstood
or not-understood in associative transfer. Understanding, the repair of not-
understanding, and discovery and repair of misunderstanding require productive
interpretations in communications. The psychologist is another such person,
but the psychological interpretation of the life expressions of other living
persons is an understanding within the theoretical cognitive attitude. It is not
determined by an interest in practical interactions with the intention of realizing
certain goals, or simply of enjoying communication as a pleasant entertainment.
Psychology is interested in theories of the general structures of the lived
experience of other persons only to the extent to which the observation and
understanding of other persons can be used as a source for descriptions that are
relevant for answers to theoretical questions.
Seen from the viewpoint of this interest, it is prima facie plausible to
assume that psychologists are “disinterested observers” because their objects
are individual persons, groups of individual persons, or even “masses” of
individual persons whose lived experiences are different, and can be separated
from, the lived experience of the psychologist. This assumption presupposes
that the communication, the dialogue of the researcher and the objects of
research, can be restricted to diagnostic questioning. Pure diagnostic commu-
nication is fragile because it can always be disturbed and even disrupted by
misunderstandings and not-understandings of the “objects” by the psychologist
or vice versa. The interrupted diagnostic communication will end in a dispute
about what has been said or heard, understood or misunderstood.34 Though such
methodological complications are of different weight in different psychological
disciplines, they occur on all levels of psychological research. It is, hence,
always questionable to what extent a psychologist can be a “disinterested”
observer and interpreter.
(2) Three levels can be distinguished in the empirical basis of psychological
research: (2.a) the level of observations of the relation between individual
persons and their natural environment including their own living bodies in a
cultural lifeworld; (2.b) the level of the encounter of individuals with their
social environment; and (2.c) the level of the individual history of a person.
Phenomena that are relevant for (2.c) include phenomena belonging to (2.b)
and (2.b) presuppose the observations of (2.a).
(2.a) The individual person as a living body is given to her/himself on the
level of first-order animalic understanding in its sensory experience of
objects outside in the natural environment and inside in bodily feelings
like pleasure or pain and strength or weakness, etc. Differences in
the constitution of the living bodies of the individuals, e.g., male or

34
There are not only interesting slips of the tongue of the clients. There are also interesting slips
of hearing and understanding by psychoanalysts, slips that are last but not least pre-determined by
their theories.
10.3 Psychology 299

female, child or adult, strong and healthy or weak and ill, etc., are
relevant factors for their reactions to stimuli of the natural environment.
The empirical materials for pure experimental psychology are in this
respect the immediate bodily life expressions, including verbal utterances
answering spoken or written questions by the psychologist. On this level
psychological research already presupposes communication; and with it
the need to avoid misunderstanding, but the need for communication is in
the case of (2.a) restricted to life expressions that are immediate reactions
to stimuli of the natural environment as effective causes. Final causes, i.e.,
purposes and guiding values of practical actions and interactions, are not
of interest and can be bracketed on this level of empirical psychological
research. All that is of significance for psychological research is that
the relevant empirical material, except for the verbal utterances of the
“objects” and their interpretation, are also relevant for observations and
descriptions of the reaction of organisms to outside stimuli for the life
sciences in the cognitive attitude of the natural sciences under the first
abstraction. This has consequences that will be considered in (3.a) below.
(2.b) Individual persons are given for empirical social psychology in their
encounters with their social context. What is of interest is the second-
order understanding of the first-order self-understanding of other persons
in their practical actions and interactions in their social environment. The
empirical basis includes, hence, in addition to the material basis of (2.a),
the understanding of purposes and basic systems of values determining
the purposes; and beyond that, of systems of higher understanding
that legitimate the applied system of values in practical actions and
interactions in a cultural lifeworld. This means that (2.b) considers
life expressions as material for interpretations and not as descriptions
of observations. It includes psychological contents and structures that
are in brackets on level (2.a). Of basic significance for the system
of the systematic human sciences is that the empirical basis of (2.b)
includes the subjective cognitive correlates of cogitata that belong to the
empirical basis of the research in the social sciences, namely, systems of
institutionalized social interactions. The results of research in the social
sciences are, hence, the correlate of, and as such a presupposition for,
the empirical basis of research in social psychology and vice versa. More
about this point will be said under (3.b).
(2.c) The individual person is individual because she/he has its unique personal
“history.” This “history” is not yet present as given in reproductive
intentional activity. It is present only in memory,35 first of all as a
history of the past social relations of the person, but also the history
of the individual experience of one’s own body in its relations to the
natural environment. The reconstruction and analysis of this history and

35
Cf. Sect. 3.4.
300 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

its influence on the present potential and actual mental and physical
actions of individual persons is the task of an understanding psychology
of the individual. Of specific significance for this understanding is the
interpretation of traumatic experiences that are present in the realm of
the pre-conscious continuum of retentions. The partially conscious and
partially only associative repressions of such contents, along with their
potential to be contents of present memories constitutes the realm of
subconscious contents in the sphere of primordial retentions that can,
nevertheless, be a determining factor for present representations and
actions. Psychoanalysis is the dimension of individual psychology that
is especially interested in this aspect of lived individual experience.
(3) Like all theories, theoretical psychology presupposes generalizing abstractions.
Two dimensions of generalising abstractions are relevant for psychology: the
generalizing abstraction in which types of events in the experiencing life of
other persons as animated bodies are given, and the generalizing abstractions
in which types of individual persons are given. There is a psychology of
perception, of recognizing gestalt qualities,36 of memory (3.a), but also of
different attitudes toward the social environment (3.b), and in addition there are
theories of different types of individual persons and the individual “histories”
of such persons (3.c).
(3.a) The theories of experimental psychology refer to data belonging to the
empirical basis (2.a), i.e., to the types of reactions to external stimuli,
with or without internal inclinations and drives given on the level of
first-order animalic and elementary understanding. The theories refer to a
system of causal relations that can be tested in experiments. Experimental
psychology on this level is able to determine most of the initial conditions
and to control and if possible to measure the impact of added causal
factors. Such experiments belong to understanding psychology only to
the extent to which empathic secondary understanding not only of verbal
life expressions but also of immediate bodily life expressions of animated
living bodies, higher animals included, are relevant for observations.
The already mentioned (2.a) epistemological problem of experimental
psychology is the problem of possible tests using cases with similar
experimental arrangements to study the physiological reactions to exter-
nal stimuli of living bodies considered as organisms, i.e., as objects of
the life sciences. A possible conclusion is that the causal connections
discovered in the life sciences can be considered as the better “expla-
nations” for the corresponding psychological causal connections. The
consequence of this naturalism is that this might be possible also for
psychological phenomena and explanations belonging to (3.b) and (3.c).

36
Gurwitsch 1929, introduced this viewpoint. The hyletic field is already structured in its own right
and is not a collection of atomistic hyletic data.
10.3 Psychology 301

The problem of this consequence is that it is by no means clear either

what “explanation” means in this case or whether what is explained is the
process of interpretation in the psyche of the interpreting psychologist
or the first-order understanding of the “objects,” (i.e., the clients of
psychological research) or both. These and connected problems will be
considered in the conclusions in Part V.
A preliminary answer to this problem in the narrower context of
a phenomenological epistemology of an empirical understanding psy-
chology is an analogue of the answer about the problem of causal
explanations in the philological-historical sciences. Human sciences,
including psychology, in a lifeworld with natural sciences are able to use
confirmed hypotheses about causal relations borrowed from the natural
sciences in their causal explanations. They are able to do so because the
natural environment that is given for them as a dependent part of the
concrete lifeworld is given under the first abstraction as nature for the
natural sciences. In a lifeworld with natural sciences, technology reveals
the partial identity of the natural environment and nature.
(3.b) According to a widespread positivistic epistemological thesis social
psychology is a science because it is able to apply methods that are
similar to the methods of empirical research in experimental psychology
and research in the life sciences. Social psychology is, hence, able to
predict social behavior and to develop technologies that are applicable in
“social engineering,” e.g., in marketing. Closer considerations reveal that
such empirical investigations have a certain similarity with experimental
research, but this similarity is in most cases restricted to collections of
empirical data representing a comparatively small subset of the relevant
set of causal conditions that would justify reliable experimental tests of
hypotheses about future actions and interactions of the “objects” in their
social environment, i.e., the relevant initial conditions.
Prima facie, the structure of the communication required for gathering
the necessary data for the predictions is simple. It starts with a list of
questions prepared by the psychologist; in continues by obtaining a list of
the answers of a representative sample of a type of contemporaries, i.e.,
the “objects” of the investigation, and it ends with the interpretation of the
answers, an interpretation that is interested in deriving predictions of the
future behavior of these “objects.” The application of statistical methods
in the selection of the sample and in the evaluation of the interpreted
answers is usually considered to be a justification for the claim of social
psychology to be a respectable empirical science.
The problem of this account is that the presupposed empirical data
are not intersensory observations. The data are interpretations of life
expressions of contemporaries given in the process of a complex diag-
nostic communication. This communication is diagnostic because what
is of interest is not a common subject matter. What is in question is the
first-order understanding of partners communicating about their social
302 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

environment. This communication is complex because it implies several

dimensions of first-order understanding and interpretations of systems of
first-order understanding. Behind the list of questions prepared by the
psychologists is the dimension of the psychologists own understanding
of the social world and the structures of social institutions.37 The
presupposed interpretation of the social world of the psychologists also
determines their hypothetical guesses about the first-order elementary
and higher understanding of the social environment of their “objects,”
that determines both their list of questions and the formulation of
these questions. The immediate consequence of possible second-order
misunderstandings on the part of the psychologists of the first-order
understanding of their “objects” in their formulation of the list of
questions will in turn be misunderstandings of the questions on the side
of the objects.38
The first methodological presupposition of the objective validity of the
results of empirical research in social psychology is the objective validity
of the presupposed theory of the structure of the social environment
of their “objects.” A “perfect” social psychology is possible only as
a correlate of “perfect theories” of the structure of the present social
world. Epistemological solutions for the basic methodological problems
of social psychology presuppose, hence, the context of an epistemological
analysis of the methodology of the social sciences. Further complications
lurk in the background.39 The general problem of psychological diag-
nostic communications is that misunderstanding and not-understanding
can be discovered and repaired only in communications on the level of a
mutual recognition of the partners in communications as partners of equal
rank. Precisely this is not the case for diagnostic questioning.
(3.c) Individual psychology is interested in types of individuals insofar as these
types are determined by similar individual histories. Results of research
in social psychology (3.b) are of basic methodological significance for the
method of the interpretation of events in the history of individual persons.
The “universal concepts” of individual psychology are morphological
types determined by general “symptoms” that have been discovered in
empirical research and free variations of certain characteristics within the

37
E.g. family and clan structures, economic structures, structures of the distribution of power.
38
It is possible, for instance, that certain groups of participants in social interactions are guided by
expectations embedded in intentions and purposes that have not been considered to be relevant for
the outcome of the interactions by other participants in the interactions. These problems will be
considered in the next section.
39
There is, furthermore, the interpretation of the psychologists of the answers of their “objects” to
their questions and inquiries, and there is then finally the task of the interpretation of the whole
context of all of the dimensions of such investigations in a final evaluation of their results.
10.3 Psychology 303

limits of pre-given material contexts.40 The task of theoretical empirical

individual psychology is, therefore, to distinguish between different
types of individual histories determining different types of behavior
characterizing different types of individual persons. The collections of
material for the generalizing abstractions, and then for recognizing this
or that person as belonging to this or that type (e.g., as an autistic,
neurotic, schizoid, introvert, or extrovert person), presupposes intense
communications between the psychologists and the “objects” of their
theories.
Two layers of individual psychology can be distinguished. The first
is the biographical level of interpreting and explaining the present or
past behavior and the self-understanding of individual persons with the
aid of their biographies. The material basis for such interpretations and
explanations is accessible for the investigating psychologist in reports
by the “objects” about their memories and reproductions of the temporal
sequences of events.41
The second layer includes the traces of those events in an individual
history that are not accessible in conscious reproductions. Psychoanalytic
research has to provoke utterances by the “objects” about their memories,
preferably memories that are immediately determined by associations
and not by conscious reconstructions in reproductions. The access to the
specific empirical basis of psychoanalysis presupposes specific methods
for the interpretation of the life expressions of the “objects.” Analytical
psychology is a branch of the interpreting sciences,42 but it requires in
addition a “technology,” a method of indirect inquisitive and diagnostic
communicating, that is able to discover the traces of a past individual
history that are covered and suppressed by a system of unconscious and
subconscious associations.
Psychoanalytic interpretations and reconstructions of a past individual
history and its significance for the present situation of the individual
person as an object of psychoanalysis presuppose assumptions about
systems of social interactions, e.g., theories about archaic cultural patterns
of social behavior that are accessible in mythological stereotypes. The
“experimental” test for such interpretations is whether an interpretation
accepted by the “objects” communicating with the psychologist is then

40
Cf. Sect. 2.3. A systematic account of the meaning of types, morphological ideal types, ideal
types and rational ideal types in the social sciences will be given in the next section.
41
For Dilthey, this level of individual psychology was also of interest for the historical human
sciences, and there especially for interpretations of works of art.
42
According to Ricoeur 1970 Freud’s psychoanalysis is an art of interpretation. Psychoanalysis in
the strict sense on the level of its application to patients does not use drugs, but only the diagnostic
dialogue with patients. Today psychiatrists trying to understand the patient using communications
with the patients can also use drugs if they have the licence to do so in the treatment of their
patients.
304 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

able to change their self–understanding and their social behavior. The

epistemological problem of such tests is that the “objects” as subjects
in their communications with the psychologist have to accept the pre-
suppositions of the psychoanalytic theory that has been applied in these
interpretations.
The epistemological problem of theories considered in their own right
for themselves is that like the theories on level (3.b), they presuppose
further assumptions and interpretations not only about interpretations
of present social structures, but also (like e.g., Freud) about archaic
social structures that are only accessible in mythological narratives. Such
assumptions are possible objects of historical research and can be applied
in explanations in historical research. Quite apart from the circumstance
that historical research can falsify such explanations simply by proving
that the assumption that the explained x was a historical fact can be
falsified,43 it is questionable whether such assumptions can be applied
in all other present and past cultural and social contexts.44
(4) As a systematic human science individual psychology is interested in the
present, but its main interest (except for the prediction about future behav-
ior of the “patients”) lies in the clinical application in psychiatry and in
psychotherapies, i.e., in interpreting the past horizon of the present. It is,
therefore, also of significance for historical interpretations and explanations.45
Psychology as a scientific discipline can be applied, and in such application,
usually called psychotherapy, it is used as a technology. The “objects” of
theoretical psychology, regardless of whether it is experimental or interpretive
or understanding psychology (verstehende Psychologie), are given in the
application in psychotherapy not as “objects,” but as consociates. The relation
between the psychologist and the patient or client is a social relation. The
close kinship between experimental psychology and experimental physiology
has its counterpart in the kinship between individual psychology and practical
medicine.
The application of technologies that have their presuppositions in theoretical
research in the life sciences to the patients of physicians is not equal to, but is
very similar to, the application of theoretical individual psychology and psychiatry
to clients or patients. The object of theoretical anatomy, physiology, etc., is the

43
Cf. Sect. 6.4.
44
The assumption that Freud was not able to analyze workers in Vienna because they were too
stupid speaks against Freud’s theory and not against the Vienna workers. Seen from the viewpoint
of historical research, it is also an absurd anachronism to explain, for instance, the behavior of
the pharaoh Akhnaton with elements taken from the myth of Oedipus. The family structures
especially the family tradition of the Egyptian pharaohs and their mythological background cannot
be explained and interpreted with myths taken from the archaic Greek tradition.
45
Biography is in the center of Dilthey’s reflections on historical interpretations; cf. Sect. 4.2.
10.3 Psychology 305

living body, including bodies of humans considered as organisms. These bodies are,
however, also given for physicians as other living bodies first of all the bodies of
other human persons, i.e., as consociates. The social relationship of the practicing
physician with the patient is indirect because the direct object of the physician is the
body of the patient considered as organism. The social relation of practicing clinical
psychologists to the patient or client is direct because it implies interpretations of
life expressions of the lived experience of other persons, but applied psychology is
also linked with the medical arts and vice versa. The link is psychiatry to the extent
to which psychiatry applies medications that affect the physiology of the human
body and are able to cause changes in the behavior and the mental constitution of
patients.
Even on the level (3.b) the psychological theories of social psychology already
imply references to norms, purposes, and values, and research in individual
psychology implies in addition the interpretations of memories required for the
reconstruction of an individual history. Their “technological” application is also
guided by an interest in the question whether a certain irregular behavior of other
persons is harmful for such persons and/or other persons, and this interest is guided
in turn by evaluations and normative considerations. Interactions of the practicing
psychologists with their clients in the actual lifeworld are, therefore, also subject to
moral and juridical evaluations and judgments of contemporaries.
Solutions for the general methodological problems of the systematic human
sciences mentioned in Sects. 10.1 and 10.2 are necessary presuppositions for
answers to the epistemological question whether and how observations in the
systematic human sciences can be observations of disinterested observers and
interpreters in the different disciplines of psychology and the social sciences.
Experimental psychology presupposes only communications about reactions of
the “objects” to stimuli. The reactions can include not only immediate bodily life
expressions, but also verbal reports of the “objects” about the lived experience
of their reactions to the stimuli.46 Left after this abstraction from all secondary
understanding of purposes and values is not nature as an in-itself closed universe,
but the presently common natural environment of the researcher and the “objects.”
The observer and experimenter can be in this sense a “disinterested observer.”
The observer can apply experimental methods in social psychology if her/his
observations of social interactions and life expressions, including information about
the purposes of the interactions in communications, remains without any admixture
of the researcher’s judgments about the values guiding such interactions. Since the
second-order understanding of the social interactions of the interpreting psycholo-
gists and the first-order understanding of the social interactions of their “objects”
now belong to separate streams of lived experience, it is tempting to assume that the

46
Experimental psychology and only experimental psychology can be reduced with behaviorism
to a natural science as long as only intersensory observations without any admixture of empathic
understanding or interpretations of verbal and/or fixed life expressions are admitted in the
description of the reactions to the stimuli.
306 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

distance between both can serve as a warrant of “disinterested interpretations” on

the side of social psychology. However, social psychology always presupposes and
implies a theory of a system of social interactions guiding its empirical research and
its theories, whether on the theoretical level or implicitly simply as a collection of
religious, political, or other “prejudices” of the psychologists.
This presupposition implies further complications. The main problem is whether
and how far the interests of theoretical social research analyzing such systems can
be disinterested in the purposes and values that determine the in-order-to-motives
in interactions that are relevant for the system. This problem is a central problem of
the social sciences; it is not important for the application of experimental methods
in social psychology, but it is nevertheless of significance for social psychology
because research in social psychology is implied in the research of the social
sciences as its correlate.
Prima facie, it could be assumed that observations that are of interest for
research in individual psychology can be called disinterested observations because
this research is interested in the individual history of other persons and not in the
individual history of the observer and interpreter. It can be assumed that the observer
can and must bracket her/his own personal history. The problem is that the material
basis for such observations is not restricted to the intersubjectively accessible
biographies of other persons. The materials of psychoanalysis are first of all
verbal life expressions of other persons in the present about their memories guided
by associations. The interpretation of this material presupposes psychoanalytic
theories, and such theories imply assumptions belonging to social psychology and
even social history. Thus individual psychology implies once again assumptions that
can only be justified in the social sciences and social history.

10.4 The Social Sciences

Two preparatory remarks about terminological distinctions are necessary before

beginning with epistemological reflections on the basic methodological problems
of the social sciences.
(1) According to Dilthey’s system three independent social sciences presupposing
partially different methodological principles can be distinguished: economics,
the science of the law, and political science. This system was accepted by
Schutz, Kaufmann, and other phenomenologists. The terminological problem
is that other social scientists before and after Dilthey preferred to speak of
sociology rather than of social sciences. For them sociology is a term for
social sciences in general with methodological principles that can be applied
to all kinds of social interactions. Presupposing this terminological decision it
is possible to distinguish between different fields of research as “sociologies
of : : : ” Economics, the science of the law, and political science are then such
sociologies of : : : together with other sociologies of : : : that are interested
10.4 The Social Sciences 307

in other regions of social interactions, e.g., the sociology of science or the

sociology of music. All “sociologies of : : : ” have to apply the same methods,
i.e., methods that belong to sociology, to the social sciences in general.
The problem is that the three Diltheyan social sciences require further guidelines
for the methodically guided application of principles that are not required in the
methodology that governs research in sociology or social sciences in general. Even
a superficial epistemological reflection already indicates that the science of the law,
economics, and even political science themselves have social functions that are
missing in other sociologies of : : : . Their main purpose as disciplines in universities
is to educate professionals and this implies that they are in this respect first of all
interested in methods for the application of the results of scientific research. In
contrast, the task of the sociology of religion or the sociology of science is not
to serve the professional education of priests or scientists.
The history of the three “Diltheyan” social sciences indicates, furthermore,
that these social sciences refer to and presuppose the interpretation of systems of
interactions in certain professions. The historical development of these professions
required an increase of systems of knowledge that had to be applied in professional
interactions. The first task of epistemological reflections on these three sciences
was and is, therefore, the interpretation of the systems of the theoretical knowledge
that has to be applied in the social interactions in involved in market economies, in
jurisprudence in the courts of law, and in political interactions. It is, furthermore, of
significance that all three disciplines are not only relevant as sociologies of certain
partial systems of interactions within a society, but are immediately of significance
for the society as a whole.
All three sciences presuppose the results of empirical sciences; however, it
is according to what has been said in the introduction, an open epistemological
question whether they can be recognized as empirical sciences in the narrower sense.
These special questions will be considered in the next three sections. The task of the
present section is the epistemological analysis of the epistemological problems of
the social sciences in general, and such an analysis has to start with a critical review
of Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world.
(2) Schutz characterized his investigations of 1932 as a phenomenological analysis
of the social structure of the lifeworld. Schutz also called his investigations
a “Wissenschaftslehre,” a term that had already been used by Husserl as an
abbreviation for the explication of the task of the Logical Investigations, i.e.,
the task of developing a phenomenological “general theory of knowledge
(Erkenntnis).”47 This task was, as mentioned in Sect. 2.2 of the introduction
and then in Sect. 4.5, the task of offering a phenomenological “general theory
of knowledge (Erkenntnis).” The first to use the term Wissenschaftslehre in
the German tradition was Fichte. The preferred translation of his term in

47
Cf. Sect. 4.5 and the interpretation and discussion of the difficulties of the term Wissenschaft-
slehre in the introduction to Embree n.d.
308 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

English is now “doctrine of science.” The term was used later by Bolzano for a
quite different type of Wissenschaftslehre. A Wissenschaftslehre in general, i.e.,
covering the common features of Fichte’s, Bolzano’s, and Husserl’s use of the
term, is a theory of the structure of the system of basic categories of the different
ontological regions that can serve as foundations of the positive sciences, and
such a Wissenschaftslehre is in this respect of significance for, but by no means
identical with, the epistemologies of positive sciences.
The difficulty for Schutz in the cultural context of the United States, which
was governed at this time by analytic positivism, was in effect to explain the
difference between a Wissenschaftslehre and a Wissenschaftstheorie, i.e., a theory
of science. A theory of science is an epistemology of positive sciences in general.
It is not necessary to give a detailed interpretation of Schutz’s attempt to cope with
the difficulty of explaining the difference between his approach and the approach
of the theory of science in the analytic tradition, given in the present task of
conducting a systematic explication of investigations about a phenomenological
epistemology of the empirical sciences.48 It is sufficient for this purpose to refer
to the distinction between phenomenology as a general theory of the categorial
structures of ontological regions that can serve as the foundations of the different
sciences, on the one hand, and on the other hand a phenomenological epistemology
reflecting the different methodologies of the formal and the empirical sciences as
characterized in Sect. 4.5.
Theories in the social sciences are theories of structures of social institutions
as parts of the structure of the social world. The social world is a system of
social relations between institutionalized groups and between individual persons
and groups. Social relations between individual persons and groups of individual
persons are “relations in interactions” between participants in systems of social
interactions. A preliminary epistemological reflection already discovers that the
objects and the region of the objects of the theories of the social sciences are not
individual events and states of affairs given in immediate experience. Descriptions in
the social sciences start, like all other descriptive sciences, with descriptions of types
given in generalizing abstraction that have their empirical basis in observations.
Following Alfred Schutz, it was a generally accepted methodological principle
that the empirical basis for phenomenological descriptions in the social sciences is
the lifeworld.49 The term for such descriptions of material ontological structures a
priori in the social lifeworld is “ideal type.”50 Like Kaufmann’s term “scheme of

48
Cf. Embree 1980 and the critical discussion in Nasu 2010; Schutz’s, “Positivistic Philosophy and
the Actual Approach of Interpretative Social Science” of 1953 was first published in Schutz 1997.
An earlier shorter version entitled “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences” was
published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1954 and is now available in Schutz CP I, 48–66.
49
Cf. on lifeworld in Schutz also: Schutz and Luckman 1973.
50
Schutz 1967, xxxi, 6, 196f; 227; cf. Embree 2015, ch. 10 with the references to Schutz CP I,
40–42, CP II, 81. A terminological synonym for “ideal type” used by Schutz after the fifties of the
10.4 The Social Sciences 309

interpretation,” the term “ideal type” was adopted by Schutz from Max Weber.51
Schutz’s term “ideal type” and related terms like “typification” will be used in the
present investigation, but some remarks about modifications in the explication of
the meaning of these terms will be necessary. The modifications are consequences
of the theory of eidetic intuition in Sect. 2.3; of the typology of understanding and
the explication of the general structures of the lifeworld in Sect. 3.2; and finally, of
the epistemological reflections on hermeneutics and histories in Part II.
According to Schutz52 Weber himself rejected a Neo-Kantian interpretation of
his understanding of “ideal type.” For Schutz, a priori forms have to be understood
in phenomenological contexts not as subjective, but as objective formal or material,
exact or morphological essences in the sense worked out in Ideas I and the Logical
Investigations. Beyond that, Schutz understands the terms “type” and “typification”
in the sense of Husserl’s explication of the meaning of “empirical types” in
Experience and Judgment.53 “Types” are already present in the typifications of
everyday life, as standardized but still ambiguous conceptualizations of common-
sense thinking.54 Apart from some extensions, e.g., the reference to Kant’s theory
of the schematism of the imagination underlying empirical concepts, there is no
difference between the understanding of “type” and “typification” in Schutz and the
explication of these terms in this investigation.
The problem left is, however, that the examples of material exact and morpholog-
ical essences mentioned by Husserl are in most cases essences of abstract dependent
parts of concrete wholes, and nothing is said about the constitution of ideal types
as essences of concrete wholes of the first order but also of higher orders. Solutions
for this problem can be found neither in Schutz nor in the literature about Schutz.55
Presupposing the formal ontological analyses of Sect. 2.2 and their application in
Sect. 2.3, it is, however, possible to offer a solution that is at least compatible with
Husserl’s basic intentions. The term “ideal type” is in this investigation understood
in the sense that has been determined in Sect. 2.3 as a result of a partial analysis
of the material, i.e., morphological ontological structures of concrete wholes of a
higher order given in eidetic intuition.

last century was “construct.” He also used for ideal types of acting persons the metaphors “puppet”
and “homunculus.”
51
Cf. Reeder 1991, 44, on Kaufmann 1944.
52
See Schutz CP IV 126 on the influence of the South-Western German Neo-Kantian school for the
interpretation of “ideal” in “ideal type” in Weber in the first section of “Positivistic Philosophy and
the Actual Approach in the Interpretative Social Sciences” in Schutz CP V. Schutz following in this
respect Kelson, emphasized, however, also in the beginning of “Husserl and His Influence on Me,”
CP V, that the Neo-Kantians nowhere provided a solution for the problem of the understanding of
the subjective meaning of a social action of the actor.
53
Husserl 1972, §83.
54
Cf. Embree 2015, ch. 11 and the references there to Schutz CP I, 323, 348; cf. CP II 233.
55
The constitution of constructs requires, according to “Positivistic Philosophy,” §2, in Schutz
CP V; a “set of abstractions, generalizations, formalizations, and idealizations.” Seen from a
formal-ontological point of view the same can be said about the constitution of numbers and sets.
310 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

This explication presupposed the formal ontological structure of the whole and
its parts and the theory of static, genetic and generative foundations discussed
in Sect. 2.2. The specific problems of the application of such ideal types in the
systematic human sciences in general were considered at the beginning of Sect. 10.3.
A systematic exposition of a system of different “types” of ideal types and their
methodological functions in the social sciences will be given after some preliminary
epistemological analyses of basic aspects of the methodology of research in
the social sciences. The analyses presuppose in addition what has been said in
Sect. 10.3 about the temporal structures and the correlations between observation,
interpretation, prediction, and explanation in the systematic human sciences in
general. Of interest is first of all the problem of the mutual interdependency of (1)
the structures of interpretations of presently observed social relations and (2) of the
structures of the predictions and the confirmation or disconfirmation of predictions
in the future horizon of present observations of social situations.
(1) All social interactions require verbal and/or non-verbal communication, and
according to Sects. 4.3 and 4.5, communications require in turn the reciprocal
second-order understanding of the first-order elementary and higher under-
standing of Others. The first-order understanding of the social interactions
of the participants in the interactions can be understood in the second-
order understanding by consociates and contemporaries. The whole context
of first-order and second-order understanding is the empirical basis for the
interpretations of social interactions and individual actions in social psychology
and the empirical social sciences. First-order elementary understanding is,
with a grain of salt, roughly equivalent to Weber’s and Schutz’s subjective or
insider understanding of the meaning of an action or an interaction. Second-
order elementary understanding is Weber’s and Schutz’s “objective” or outsider
meaning. “Objective” is a misnomer in this case because elementary and
even higher secondary understanding of the meaning of actions and of life
expressions of Others in general is by itself not an immediate warrant of its
intersubjective, i.e., objective validity, because it is always accompanied by
possible misunderstanding and not-understanding. Secondary understanding as
interpretation in the theoretical cognitive attitude needs, hence, a methodology
or at least a doctrine of methods.56
Two temporal dimensions of secondary understanding can be distinguished:
the secondary understanding of predecessors, and the secondary understanding of
contemporaries and consociates. Predecessors and their actions and interactions are
given for secondary understanding only via reports in fixed life expressions, histor-
ical narrations. Consociates and contemporaries and their actions and interactions
are given in actual or at least possible observations as immediate life expressions.

56
On subjective and objective meaning and Schutz’s critique of “objective” meaning in Weber’s
terminology see Schutz CP II, 257 quoted in Embree 2015, ch. 11.
10.4 The Social Sciences 311

Theories in the empirical social sciences presuppose the results of research in

social history. The foci of the research interest of the social sciences are the struc-
tures of social interactions in the present, but this research presupposes historical
material for the idealizing abstractions in which the ideal types that are applied in
this research are given. Schutz mentions the significance of history several times,57
but neglects, like Husserl,58 the difference between historiography and historical
research in history as a science. Research in the social sciences presupposes and
is one-sidedly founded in reports about the results of methodologically guided
research in history in general, and especially in contemporary history.
The central focus of empirical research in the social sciences is the interpretation
of the structures of social interactions in the present. The temporal structure of this
empirical basis of the empirical social sciences is the structure of the actual present
together with its immediate past and future horizons. The immediate objects of
observations in the empirical social sciences are the life expressions of participants
in social interactions in a present that they share with the observing social scientist.
It has been shown in Sect. 10.3 that it is impossible to apply the methodological
criteria for valid interpretations in history in general and social history in particular.
It is, therefore, necessary to look for other criteria that can serve as warrants for
the objective validity of interpretations in the “interpretative (verstehende) social
sciences”59 and of the implicit first-order understanding of causal relations that is
understood in the interpretations. The difference in the meaning of “understanding”
in “understanding sociology” and “understanding social psychology” is in this
respect of crucial epistemological significance.
Seen from the viewpoint of the phenomenological theory of understanding, inter-
pretative psychology presupposes a reflection on certain types of intentional acts
that are correlates of certain types of intentional objects. In social psychology such
reflections are one-sidedly founded in the pre-scientific secondary understanding of
a first-order understanding of some state of affairs of other persons. The “object”
of the interpretations of social psychology is, hence, the givenness of the social
environment in the first-order understanding of the present lived experience of
Others. What is of interest for social psychology in this respect is the structure of
the experience of social structures in general, and not the social structures for their
own sake.
Theories in the social sciences are interested in the structures of social insti-
tutions. Social institutions are systems of social relations, and social relations are
relations between individuals or groups of individuals in social interactions. The
epistemologically best world is a world in which the social structures that are
given for the social psychologist are identical with the social structures that are

57
E.g., Schutz 1967, 210.
58
Cf. Seebohm 2013.
59
Setting aside the difficulty that “interpretative” would be an inadequate translation because
“interpretation” means more than just “Verstehen.,” The terminology used in this investigation
follows the explication of the terms in the analyses of the typology of understanding in Sect. 3.2.
312 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

given for the social scientists. However, a theoretical claim of this sort always
requires always critical reflections on observations that are able to confirm such
assumptions.60 Within the social sciences the first-order understanding of social
interactions by participants in these social interactions presupposes and begins with
the understanding of their purpose determining their in-order-to-motive, i.e., the
practical intention of their activities.
All social interactions are guided by purposes, values, and norms given in the
immediate experience of elementary understanding and beyond that in systems of
higher understanding, and these systems of understanding include the elementary
and higher understanding of the natural and/or social situations of the interactions.
Purposes, values and norms are correlates in the context of understanding actions
and interactions. The realization of a purpose is the realization of an observable
object that has a certain value, and it is the value that is constitutive for norms for
governing actions and interactions: if x has the value y, then x should be, or, in case
of a moral value, ought to be realized.61
The first and second-order understanding of the purposes determines the under-
standing of efficient means for realizing the purpose in the process of the social
interaction, i.e., in Schutz’s terminology the “in-order-to-motives” determine the
“because-motives.”62 The terminology of Schutz covers the aspect of the moti-
vational relevance of the subjective lived experience of the participants in social
interactions, i.e., the aspect that is of interest for interpretative social psychology and
by implication according to Sect. 10.3, for individual psychology as well. However,
the guiding purpose can be and was understood in pre-scientific philosophical
ontology as a final cause that determines the selection and the order of the objective
sequence of efficient causes for the process of the realization of the purpose. It
is, therefore, in many cases possible that the first-order and then also a second-
order understanding of social interactions imply an understanding of a context of
causations. This first-order understanding implies the expectation and with it the
prediction that the action or interaction will be able to realize the purpose with the
aid of efficient means, including tools and techniques, if there are no unforeseen
disturbances caused by external efficient causal conditions.63
(2) Interpretations in the social sciences have to be the result of a methodologically
guided secondary understanding of the object, the cogitatum of the first-
order understanding of the social interactions by the participants in the social
interactions. The knowledge and understanding of causal relations in the present
presupposed for the interpretation of social interactions in the present implies

60
This is, for instance, at least questionable for psychoanalytic interpretations and ideology
critique.
61
This formula is a slightly extended version of the formulas that have been discussed in Sect. 4.5
on normative sciences in the LI. See also Embree 2006 and 2010b.
62
Schutz 1967, 188–190; Schutz CP II 81, CP V “Reflections on the Problem of Relevance,” §§2
and 3, cf. Embree 2015, ch. 10.
63
Cf. Schutz and Luckman 1973, 3, C, 4 on typicality and prediction 238f.
10.4 The Social Sciences 313

both predictions of the future course of events and explanations of sequences

of past events, all considered in terms of the future and past horizon of the
present. Predictions can be confirmed or disconfirmed. It is, hence, prima facie
reasonable to expect that it might be possible to test interpretations of social
interactions in the social sciences by testing the predictions that are implied in
the interpretation, because these interactions are themselves guided by a more
or less explicit first-order understanding of their purposes as final causes and the
efficient means required as efficient causes for the realization of the purposes.
As sciences of the present social world, the empirical social sciences emerged,
as already mentioned, in a cultural lifeworld with natural sciences and a steady
progress in the application of technologies in practical social interactions. Pre-
supposing this cultural context, it was natural to assume that there are cases in
which the participants in practical interactions are able to foresee and predict
the consequences of their actions. The presupposition of this cultural context in
empirical social research in a present with developed natural sciences implies the
partially misleading expectation of possible applications of the methods of the
natural sciences, first of all the methods of experimental research, and beyond that,
even the application of mathematical models in the social sciences.64
Such expectations ought to keep in mind that, seen from the viewpoint of a
phenomenological epistemology, the region of communications, purposes, actions,
and interactions, values, and norms are bracketed after the first abstraction that is
constitutive for the natural sciences. In contrast, what is in brackets for the cognitive
attitude of the natural sciences is, on the one hand, of essential significance for
causal explanations and predictions in the systematic human sciences in general, and
especially in the social sciences. It is, on the other hand, also of significance that the
first-order elementary understanding of practical social interactions in encounters
with the natural environment, is according to the analyses of Sects. 7.2 and 9.2,
one of the generative foundation of the first-order higher understanding of effective
causal relations in the natural sciences.65
A solution for the problem of the relation between predictions based on causal
relations and interpretations in the social sciences requires a phenomenological
analysis of the structure of rational behavior, i.e., a behavior that is guided by
a first-order elementary and higher understanding of causal relations in social
interactions. The first-order understanding of the participants in social interactions
already includes the understanding of the prediction that the purpose, the goal of an
interaction, will be realized if the materials, the tools, and the techniques required for
this success are available and no external factors interfere in the process of realizing
the purpose.

64
This is the assumption of the positivistic and analytic tradition in the epistemology of the
systematic and even the historical human sciences. Cf. also the Introduction of Embree 2015.
65
Cf. Sect. 8.1 on the generative foundations of the natural sciences.
314 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

Efficient causes that are determined by purposes in systems of rational social

interactions can be called the internal conditions of the interactions. External causal
conditions are the ideally possible causal relations between social interactions and
those events in their natural or social environment that are of significance for the
success or failure of the realization of the purpose of the interaction. These implicit
understanding of causal relations that already occurs in first-order elementary under-
standing (and, therefore, also underlies the methodological structure of predictions)
is of a higher degree of complexity in the social sciences than in the natural sciences.
A summary of what has been said until now is sufficient for the justification of
the application of the general thesis of Sect. 10.3, i.e., the thesis about the possi-
bility of the synthesis of causal explanations and interpretations in the systematic
human sciences to the social sciences. Social interactions imply the dimension of
final causes as purposes and efficient causal relations as means. This context is
already given for the participants in social interactions in first-order elementary
understanding, and then in higher understanding as well. This first-order elementary
or higher understanding of the participants in social interactions can be understood
in pre-scientific secondary understanding of their contemporaries, and finally also
in the methodologically guided interpretations of the social sciences.
The consequence of this summary is that the classical distinction between human
sciences as sciences of understanding and the natural sciences as sciences of causal
explanations and predictions does not hold water for present interpretations of
present first-order understanding of present social interactions of the participants
in interactions. However, this is only a negative answer to the epistemological
question about criteria for objectively valid interpretations and/or predictions in the
social sciences. A positive answer requires further analyses of the specific intrinsic
structure of the ideal types that can be applied in the social sciences. The ideal types
that are applicable in the life sciences are, according to the examples given in Sect.
2.2 and then Sect. 2.3, first of all ideal types of the wholes of first order, i.e., organic
wholes. Ideal types that are applicable in the social sciences to different types of
social interactions are again according to the examples given in Sects. 2.2 and 2.3,
wholes of a higher order.
What has been said about final causes is of significance for a positive answer
to the basic epistemological question is just mentioned. Final causes, purposes
determined by systems of values and determining the subjective in-order-to motives
of social interactions, are of basic significance for the structure of ideal types of
social interactions. Since final causes determine the selection of actions that serve
as efficient causes for the realization of the purpose of the social interactions, ideal
types are of basic significance for the interplay of between confirmed or discon-
firmed expectations and predictions, on the one hand, and first-order elementary
understanding and pre-scientific second-order understanding, not-understanding,
and misunderstanding, on the other hand.
The first task is to analyze the specifications of such morphological ideal
types and the special relevance of rational ideal types for research in the social
sciences. The explication given of the meaning of “ideal type” additionally requires,
according to Schutz, the explication of the meaning of “construct” not only as
10.4 The Social Sciences 315

a synonym of “ideal type,” but also as a term that can be used as a methodical
guideline for applications of different subtypes of ideal types in empirical social
research. According to Schutz, a “construct” implies a methodological rule for the
application of the construct and its substructures to the objects of empirical social
research. The constitution of constructs requires the application of abstract ideal
types to empirical material that belongs to not yet structurally articulated empirical
types of social communities and institutions.66 The next problem is the problem
of the criteria of objective validity. Answers to this question have to begin with a
critical evaluation of the list of Schutzean postulates like relevance, consistency,
and adequacy that can be applied as guidelines for empirical research in the social
sciences.67
According to Schutz, it is possible to use the term “ideal type” for certain
essential dependent or independent partial structures of “course of action types.”
Schutz distinguishes (1) course of action types; (2) personal ideal types guided
by typical in-order-to-motives; (3) cultural products or artifacts (including tools).68
For Schutz type (2) can be derived from type (1) and vice versa. Type (3) can be
understood as the realized product of (1) as guided by in-order-to-motives. The
personal ideal types (2) are the ideal types or constructs that can be understood
as puppets or homunculi in the classification of Schutz.
A precise understanding of this classification has to cope with difficulties. The
main difficulty is that there seems to be a one-to-one correlation between a course
of action type and a personal type. It follows that it will be difficult for Schutz
to distinguish clearly between a phenomenological epistemology (Wissenschaft-
slehre) for the social sciences and a phenomenological psychology serving as a
phenomenological epistemology for social psychology as an empirical science.
It cannot be the task of a systematic investigation to decide problems of the
interpretation of Schutz’s theory of ideal types and constructs and his division of
different types and constructs. What had to be emphasized is only that his theory
is, though partially modified and extended here, the presupposition of a formal and
material analysis of a system of different subtypes of the general type of ideal types
that can be applied in the social sciences.
The comprehensive (1) ideal types that can be applied in the social sciences are
not “course of action types” for individuals. They are course of social interaction
types. The ideal type “social interaction” is a basic category of the ontology of
the lifeworld in general, and as such a structural whole of the highest degree of

66
Embree 2009c.
67
Cf. in Schutz 1967, 237. The explications of the concepts “ideal type,” “construct,” and
“postulate” ought not be understood as an interpretation of Schutz’s theory of ideal types,
constructs, and postulates. Instead, it prepares the explication of the application of these terms
in the context of the present systematic investigation.
68
Following Embree n.d. ch. 10 see for (1) Schutz 1967, 197, CP I 17, 40; for (2) Schutz 1967,
187–90, CP I 19, CP IV 101; and for (3) Schutz 1967, 187; CP II 81, and for the following see also
Schutz 1967, 187, 196f., 227, 242.
316 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

abstract universality in the region of social phenomena in the lifeworld. Essentially

dependent parts of social interactions as structural wholes are (2) the ideal types of
purposes, their relation to value systems, and their realizations as artifacts with the
aid of efficient causal means. Essentially independent parts, i.e., parts that can be
parts of more than one structural whole are (3) the dimensions in the environment
of the social interaction in the lifeworld in which the purpose can be realized,
and finally, (4) the personal ideal types of the different course of action types,
i.e., the different roles or functions of individual participants in course of social
interaction types. The latter ideal types (4) imply the methodological significance
of social psychology for the social sciences. Of interest for individual psychology
is in addition the ability of individual persons to belong to more than one and to
different types of social interactions.
A classification of different ideal types that are subtypes, partial aspects of ideal
types (1) of social interactions, has to start with (2). It is usually presupposed tacitly,
and has been implicitly presupposed in the preceding reflections, that the realized
purpose in social interactions has the character of an artifact in the broadest sense
and that the means to produce such artifacts have the character of effective causes
in the natural environment. Such social interactions will be called practical social
interactions guided by in-order-to-motives that determine subordinated actions
guided by because-motives. However, there are also social interactions with the in-
order-to-motive of introducing corrections or changes not in the natural, but in the
social environment. Such social interactions, e.g., the election of leaders, interaction
in a court of law, etc., can be called civil social interactions.
The social environment to which such civil social interactions are applied is the
social environment of practical social interactions. Because the system of practical
social interaction is supposed to be the object governed by civil social interactions,
it is the static and generative foundation of these interactions. The limiting case
between ideal types of practical social interactions and of civil social interaction
is the use of instruments, e.g., weapons as efficient means in brute violence as a
means of political power to end social conflicts. All ideal types of social interactions
beyond this level are the rational (or better reasonable) ideal types of civil social
interactions that have the general purpose of peacekeeping in systems of customs
and the law.
The analysis of the system of further subtypes of social interactions has to start
with practical social interactions because the social environment along with civil
social interactions in a social lifeworld presuppose a system of practical social
interactions as their foundation. Different types of purposes and the mode of their
realization in practical social interactions determine two different ideal types of such
interactions: (1) the ideal type of bricolage interactions and (2) the rational types of
social interactions. An answer to the question why investigations concerning (2)
have usually been preferred by social scientists while (1) has been often neglected
will be given below. The structures of social interactions of type (1) are, however,
the generative foundation of interactions of type (2) in a pre-scientific lifeworld, and
still determine most of the everyday social interactions in a lifeworld with sciences.
10.4 The Social Sciences 317

(1) No explicit knowledge of the efficient causality guiding the search for means
to realize the purpose is required in cases of bricolage ideal types. The
technical term bricolage is borrowed from ethnological research in cultural
anthropology, and means that the finding of means and the recognition of
actions as means is the outcome of haphazard searches; it is also possible
that the finding of certain means can change the original projection of the
purpose. Two examples of subtypes of bricolage ideal types can be mentioned.
(1.a) Some practical social interactions take place on the level of animalic
understanding without any explicit first-order understanding of the purposes
and means guiding the fulfillment of in-order-to-motives that are satisfied by
the participation in the interaction. (1.b) Though there are interactions that
do have an explicit first-order understanding of the purpose and are likewise
satisfied by the participation in the interaction (e.g., dance, playing games, and
singing together) most examples of this subtype of practical social interactions
are interested in the realization of freely chosen purposes as “artifacts,” e.g., the
creation and enjoyment of works of the fine arts or poetry. Techniques based on
conscious application of knowledge about efficient causal relations are of minor
significance in such interactions. Required are the “free” associative intuitions
of the genius.69
(2) Ideal types of rational practical social interactions requiring rational behavior
from all participants, e.g., participants that represent the ideal type homo
oeconomicus, must have purposes that are able to function as final causes
determining a “rational” selection of efficient means and shaping the rational
determination of the temporal sequence of the application of such means. The
selection can be called rational because it implies the understanding of causal
relations of ground and consequence. The understanding of the interactions by
the participants has the general form: if the realization of a purpose P with the
value V is desired, then x, y, and z have to be done in this order. Rational ideal
types of social interactions presuppose a first-order understanding of efficient
causality that is already more or less determined by the first understanding of
efficient causality in the context of the natural sciences.
A caveat must be added. To call purposes of practical social interaction rational
in the sense characterized above does not imply that the choice of such purposes
as a guide for interactions is rational in the sense of being reasonable. There may
also be some good reasons to prefer purposes for practical social interactions that
are incompatible with rational practical behavior. It is by no means reasonable for
Buddhist or Christian monks to choose purposes that are characteristic for certain
types of rational behavior, governed by the leading purposes of participants in a
market economy.

69
Participation in and interpretation of such interactions requires the “re-living” in Dilthey’s sense
of the work of the “genius”; cf. Seebohm 2004, 60f., 160f.
318 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

A rational ideal type is “ideal” in a double sense. It is ideal as a ideal type

of a social interaction, and it is ideal because the in-order-to motives obey the
commands of the understanding of causal relations. The understanding of such types
is already pre-given in the general structures of animalic and then in elementary
understanding. What is understood on these levels is the function of efficient means
in the realization of purposes and the fulfillment or disappointment of expectations.
The participants in rational practical interactions following the general patterns
of rational behavior are able to predict the outcome of their actions in the
course of their present experience and to observe whether the prediction will be
confirmed or disconfirmed. Their first-order understanding of practical interactions
having the general structure of such types can be understood by consociates and
contemporaries in secondary understanding. An outside observer of a practical
interaction who understands the system of causal connections that is determined
by a certain ideal type of rational behavior is in turn able to predict the actions of
the participants in the presently observed practical interaction. It is, furthermore,
possible that the observer has a better understanding of the rational ideal type of
behavior than the participants in the observed interactions do. The observers are
in this case able to predict that the expectations of the observed participants in the
interaction will fail, and such observers will accordingly be able to give some good
advice for doing a better job.
Schutz characterized his investigations of 1932 as “sinnhafter Aufbau der
sozialen Welt.”70 Given the context of these investigations in the development of
the phenomenological movement, “social world” has to be understood as “social
structure of the lifeworld,” i.e., structures as given in first and second-order
understanding in the lifeworld. Thus Schutz’s Wissenschaftslehre can be understood
according to the original meaning of the German term as a phenomenological theory
of the material categorial structures of the region of the social world as a part of the
categorial structures of the lifeworld. However, there are other passages in Schutz’s
writings that indicate that this Wissenschaftslehre is also relevant for the sciences in
general and for the epistemology of the empirical social sciences.71 Of interest for
a phenomenological epistemology reflecting on the methods of the social sciences
is, first of all, Schutz’s system of the postulates that can serve as warrants for the
objective validity of ideal types in a phenomenological epistemology of the social
sciences.
The first two postulates, (1) the postulate of logical consistency and (2) the –
originally Cartesian – postulate of clarity and distinctness, are obviously postulates

70
Cf. for what follows the discussion of the difficulties of this term (with numerous references to
the writings of Schutz) the Introduction to Embree 2015.
71
Cf. fn. 148: Wissenschaftslehre in Fichte is the deduction of the basic categories of theoretical
and practical philosophy as an explication of the positing absolute acts, Tathandlungen, of the
absolute I. Wissenschaftslehre in Bolzano is the explication of the categories of an ontological
logic. However, in the development of the positivism of the nineteenth century in Germany in the
wake of J. S. Mill, the term already covered epistemological reflections on the methodology of the
empirical sciences as well.
10.4 The Social Sciences 319

for the applicability of theories in the empirical sciences in general. However, (3) the
postulate of relevance, more precisely the postulate of interpretative relevance, is of
significance not only for the methodology of the construction of ideal types, but also
for the methods of verifying and falsifying of propositions that have been derived
from ideal types in the social sciences. This postulate requires the determination of
a scheme of reference, i.e., of the scope and the limits within which the relevant
ideal types can be applied.72 It can be understood as a specifying reformulation
of a general methodological principle for categorial schemes that determine the
application of basic categories in empirical sciences in general for the special
purposes of the social sciences. What this third postulate really means in the social
sciences can only be determined with the aid of the fourth and the fifth postulates,
i.e., (4) the postulate of subjective interpretation and (5) the postulate of adequacy.73
(4) the postulate of subjective interpretation has a number of presuppositions. It
presupposes that (4.a) the actors know where their action starts and where it
ends, and what their “in-order-to-motives” and their “because-motives” are. In
terms of the typology of understanding laid out in Sect. 3.2 of this investigation,
actors have a first-order understanding of the purposes and the efficient means
used for the realization of the purposes in their actions. (4.b) In social life,
the individual actor’s knowledge of the action also implies that this action
is given as an aspect of an interaction in a shared intersubjective world, i.e.,
in a structural reciprocity of perspectives. (4.c) This subjective meaning can
be understood by the partners of the actors who are also involved with the
actors in the interaction because they share a set of purposes with these actors.
Moreover it is understood, and this means it can be understood in secondary
understanding according to Sect. 3.2 of this investigation, by consociates and
contemporaries who are not immediately involved in the interaction. Interpre-
tations of the subjective meaning of social interactions for the participants, the
actors in such interactions, require in addition a secondary understanding that is
not only not involved in, but also disinterested in the interaction. The difficulties
connected with this requirement have already been considered in Sect. 10.2 and
will be considered again in the end of this section.
(5) The postulate of adequacy in Schutz’s system of postulates can be understood as
a special version of the requirement of the testability, of the openness for confir-
mation and disconfirmation of hypotheses and theories in the empirical sciences
in general, for the specific situation of the social sciences. Except for certain
aspects of the postulate of relevance mentioned above, the first four postulates
can be considered as methodological rules for the construction of theories in
the social sciences, i.e., for the construction of ideal types of social actions and

72
See “Reflections on the Problems of Relevance 3” and “The Interdependency of the Systems of
Relevance” in Schutz CP V.
73
About the system of postulates in Schutz’s see Embree 2015 at the end of chapter 10 and the
references there to Schutz 1967, 144, 241; CP I 24, 35; CP II, 18f, 85; CP IV, 22; and CP V
“Positivistic Philosophy,” etc., §3.
320 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

interactions. The postulate of adequacy is the basic postulate for a methodology

of confirming or disconfirming such constructs, i.e., it warrants the consistency
of the constructs with their empirical basis. This means for the social sciences
that the construct is consistent with common-sense representations of the social
reality, i.e., the construct has to be understandable for the actors and their fellow
humans in terms of their common-sense interpretation of the social interaction.
Whether this is the case or not can be verified by empirical findings.74
Critical evaluations of difficulties connected with the postulates of subjective
interpretation and adequacy have to start with a reminder. What was said about
subjective meaning in postulate (4) and about adequacy in postulate (5) might be
applicable in the social sciences, but it is not applicable for the problems of a
methodology for interpretations in the historical human sciences. Interpretations in
the historical human sciences are interpretations of fixed life expressions, first of
all texts of authors who created them in a distant past. Given the a priori structures
of intersubjective temporality in the lifeworld, it is impossible to ask in present
communications with the actors/authors whether an interpretation of the subjective
meaning of their actions or interactions is acceptable for them as an interpretation
of their own first-order understanding of their actions or interactions. According to
Sects. 5.3 and 5.4, it is not possible to consider the “original intention,” i.e., precisely
the subjective motives, of an author of a text as a warrant for the confirmation
or disconfirmation of hypothetical interpretations of a text. The warrants of valid
interpretations of fixed life expressions, first of all texts, are the methodological
rules of text hermeneutics, and these rules refer to the context of texts of a text and
not to its author. The original intentions of authors and actors can be given in the
historical human sciences only in the reconstruction of a past reality in historical
research in the narrower sense.
The basic deficiency that lurks behind this and other difficulties in Schutzean
social science is that the methodology of philological-historical research that was
developed since Schleiermacher and Boeckh in the nineteenth century was neglected
in the epistemological reflections of both Husserl and Schutz.75 Presupposing what
was said in Sects. 10.2 and 10.3, it is impossible to apply these methods in the
interpretation of presently observable social actions and interactions. Thus Schutz’s
postulate of adequacy is not applicable for the interpretations of the human sciences
in general because it is not applicable in the historical human sciences. It is beyond
that also not applicable if fixed life expressions, texts, are of central significance in
branches of the social sciences, first of all the science of the law. This is, however,
only an indicator of the real problem.

74
CP II 85 and CP V l.c. – The postulates of relevance and of adequacy can be understood as
necessary implications of applications of an occasionally mentioned postulate of testability or
verification for the empirical sciences in general of the positivistic tradition to the social sciences
in Schutz epistemology of the social sciences.
75
Cf. Sect. 4.3 above.
10.4 The Social Sciences 321

The basic problem behind these difficulties is that the interest in presently given
social interactions presupposes a cognitive attitude that is restricted to one abstract
dimension, an abstract moment of the concrete experience of social reality. The
present in the lifeworld in general is always given as a dependent correlate of its
past horizon and social research interpreted in presently given social interactions
always presupposes and implies research in social history. Social history is, like
history in general, only present in fixed life expressions.
Disregarding this dimension of problems there are two other difficulties for
applications of the criteria mentioned in the postulate of adequacy. The first is
an ambiguity. In Schutz’s formulations the postulate refers to course of action
types of individual actors. However, the subjective, social psychological aspect is
dominating in the analysis of subjective meaning even for the requirement that an
interpretation has to presuppose that the actors understand the action as an action in
the intersubjective world, i.e., in a structural reciprocity of perspectives. Description
of the structures of systems of institutional interaction by no means presuppose a
positivistic behaviorism if they replace the metaphors “puppets” and “homunculi”
by n-placed relations between nodes of functions, i.e., description of social roles.
For a cognitive attitude that is interested in the description of such structures in a
certain type of feudal society “king” is a function that can be satisfied by “variable”
persons who function only as substitution instances. The “puppets” or “homunculi”
as abstract schemes of concrete individuals occur only for social psychologists who
are interested in the representations in which a king is given to members of the
feudal nobility and the members of the feudal nobility are given for the king.
According to Schutz it is possible to test predictions about the future behavior
of participants in systems of interactions or the future development of such systems
in experiments.76 Though it is only an occasional remark and not a postulate, this
possibility is of basic significance for a critical phenomenological analysis of the
postulate of adequacy. It is of significance because the epistemological structure
of the experimental testing of predictions is an essential partial aspect of the
application of the postulate. Other aspects will be considered below. The hypotheses
derived from a pre-given ideal type in such applications are assumptions about the
subjective meaning of an action in the first-order understanding of the action of
participants in interactions. The quasi-experimental test is to ask the participants in
the interactions whether they agree or disagree with the hypothetical interpretation
of their first-order understanding. The hypothetical interpretation implied in the
ideal type is confirmed if they agree. It is disconfirmed if they disagree.
There is, however, the possibility that a confirmation of a hypothetical interpre-
tation will be followed by the disconfirmation of a hypothesis about future events
in the development of a system of social interactions or in partial aspects of the
system. This disconfirmation of a prediction implied in a quasi-experimental test
is in such cases the correlate of a disappointment of the expectations of first-order
understanding of the interaction of participants in the interaction. The confirmed

76
CP I, 165; CP V, “Positivistic Philosophy.”
322 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

interpretation and the disconfirmed prediction are compatible in such cases. Several
types of external factors can be responsible for such situations, and there are also
several types of internal factors that can cause similar problems.
(1) External factors in the strict sense are changes in the natural environment that
cause destructions of the causal conditions of techniques or technologies used
in practical interactions in the encounter with the natural environment. As in
history, explanations of such changes are possible with the aid of causal laws
borrowed from the natural sciences, but predictions of future events in the
present presupposing such causal laws are also possible. Predictions of their
consequences for social structures share the difficulties that will be mentioned
in (2).
(2) Social history teaches that technical or technological innovations can change the
structure of practical social interactions, and even the structure of whole systems
of social interactions. Given a certain level of the development of technologies
in a lifeworld with sciences, it is once again possible to predict the potential
of developing new technologies again with the aid of theories borrowed from
the natural sciences, but a prediction of the social effects of such hitherto
unknown causal factors emerging in the present together with the innovations is
impossible. The social effects of innovations can only be recognized by looking
back at what has happened in the past after the emergence of the technical or
technological innovations in social history.
(3) Conditions in the natural environment that can disturb practical social interac-
tions and systems of practical social interactions can themselves be side effects
of techniques and technologies that have been applied in the interactions and
caused changes in the natural environment.
(4) Practical or civil social interactions in the social environment of a practical
social interaction can be factors that disturb or even interrupt the realization
of the purpose of practical social interactions. Closer considerations of the
impact of these factors presuppose the phenomenological analyses of the
basic structures of civil social interactions in the final two sections of this
investigation.
External factors are first of all of significance for cases of the ideal type “rational
practical social interaction,” but predictions presupposing ideal types of this kind
can also be partially or completely disconfirmed by internal factors, i.e., competing
values and purposes determining the interactions of a system of social interactions.
Such factors occur if not all groups of participants in the same systems of social
interactions are guided by the same purposes, e.g., workers and trade unions versus
management and shareholders. They occur, furthermore, if there are conflicts in
cases in which an individual or groups of individuals participate in different systems
of interactions with different purposes, values, and duties, e.g., duties as family
members or members of religious communities and membership in the higher ranks
of economic or political systems. It is possible in such cases that choices of efficient
means for the realization of goals in one system are prohibited by the other system,
e.g., the charging of interest for a banker who is a faithful Muslim.
10.4 The Social Sciences 323

There are also no problems with predictions about the outcome of practical social
interactions that belong to the level of animalic understanding. First-order animalic
understanding by itself is originally given in communications via immediate bodily
life expressions. Communications referring to contents of animalic understanding
on the level of linguistic expressions are determined by systems of higher under-
standing. Predictions that can be confirmed or disconfirmed in experimental tests
can be borrowed from the life sciences and/or from experimental psychology.
Difficulties occur for ideal types of “free” interactions because justifications of
actions referring to efficient causality are not needed, and are even suspicious in the
context of such interactions. Such free interactions can be characterized as bricolage
because they are not determined by references to causal efficiency. The general
difficulty for applications of the postulate of adequacy in such cases is that it is
meaningless to ask for because-motives referring to efficient causal connections.
Of interest in this respect are interactions of artists creating works of art as their
“artifacts” and their “audience” of more or less active participants that have the
“taste” to appreciate such works of art. Of basic significance for the development
of social structures are, however, first of all the “works” of shamans, of prophets
and enlightened spiritual leaders, of philosophers, and of scientists as creators of
a “scientific worldview.” Of significance is, hence, what belongs in general to the
literary tradition of genres of higher understanding or, in other words, all cultural
interactions and their products along with the social structures of the consumption
of such products that are usually considered as belonging to the higher education of
a cultural tradition.
It is impossible to confirm or disconfirm interpretations of practical social inter-
actions of this type with the aid of confirmations or disconfirmations of predictions
because no significant references to causal relations are implied in first-order
understanding of the authors and the “consumers” of the artifacts of such practical
social interactions. The “works” produced by such social interactions are supposed
to be at least in part created “under the influence” of “original inspirations” and to
be “works of genius” in the case of works of art, philosophy, or basic new ideas in
the sciences,77 but also in the case of prophets of divine revelations. These original
inspirations usually determine both the purpose of the interactions and the means
that are able to realize the purpose all together in one step.
This list of internal factors is not complete but it is sufficient to shed doubts on the
assumption that interpretations of social interactions of this type can be confirmed
or disconfirmed if the participants in the interactions admit in interviews that they
agree or disagree with the interpretation. A “testing” of an interpretation of, e.g., a
religious ceremony, requires more than asking some deliberately chosen participant
about what the ceremony means in her/his everyday understanding of the ceremony.
It requires, hence, more than the version of a postulate of adequacy that might
be sufficient for testing interpretations derived from rational ideal types, e.g., in
economics.

77
See Sect. 4.1 on Boeckh and the work of the genius.
324 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

The above-mentioned internal factors belong to the subtype of abstract ideal

types that determine the subjective attitude and the in-order-to-motives of partici-
pants or groups of participants in an interaction. Social and individual psychology
are able to use diagnostic interviews in order to discover causes of abnormal
behavior and attitudes in the “everyday” understanding of the social environment of
certain individuals participating in social interactions that require rational behavior.
Such discoveries presuppose the objective validity of a pre-given interpretation of
the intersubjectively recognized purposes, guiding values, and effective means of
social interactions. It is, however, also a basic methodological assumption of the
postulate of adequacy that hypothetical interpretations of social interactions can
be confirmed or disconfirmed in diagnostic interviews of participants in the social
interactions. There have been at least prima facie no problems for this implicit
methodological assumption in the postulate of adequacy in cases of ideal types of
interactions that require rational behavior.
Difficulties surface for cases of ideal types of the above-mentioned “free”
interactions. It is tempting in such cases to propose a return to the methods that
can be applied in the history of ideas. The problem is that the empirical basis for
this type of research is restricted to fixed life expressions of predecessors in the past.
Only the methods of philological-historical research are left for the evaluation of the
objective validity of hypothetical interpretations. These methods require the strict
separation of the interpretation of fixed life expressions, texts from the application
of the truth claims of the text tradition in the present, but the re-enacting of the
objective meaning connected with the immediate recognition of their truth claims is
precisely what happens in such social interactions.78
Of interest in this respect are also the so-called “interpretations” of fixed life
expressions that happen in present social interactions, e.g., the “interpretations”
of a symphony or a tragedy, but also of religious ceremonies and cults. These
interpretations have the character of “re-living” a work of art or, in the case of
religious traditions, of acts of “practicing” a religion. The ideal type of such re-
enactments presupposing the unity of interpretation and application includes and
presupposes knowledge borrowed from the storehouse of results of philological
and historical research. However, in acts of re-living, such knowledge only has the
function of a handmaiden of the creative re-enacting of the work of the genius or the
revelations of the prophets. This type of “interpretation” cannot be considered as the
outcome of the application of the methodology of an empirical science interested
in a theoretical confirming or disconfirming of hypothetical interpretations. They
are themselves an object, but not an outcome, of research in the social sciences as
empirical sciences.
According to Schutz, interpretations of systems of social interactions are ade-
quate according to the postulate of adequacy if they can be “verified by empirical
findings.” This verifying has to be the result of the answers of participants in a

78
Cf. Sects. 5.3 and 10.2.
10.4 The Social Sciences 325

social interaction to questions about their first-order understanding of the meaning

of the actions and interaction. What has been neglected in the epistemological
analyses up until now was that the testing of the predictions in applications of
the postulate presupposes the context of communications between the researchers
and the “objects” of their research, i.e., the participants in an interaction. There
is, hence, the possibility that the foundations for the above-mentioned difficulties
can be found in a phenomenological analysis of this aspect of the postulate, as
well as the further possibility and that this analysis will be of significance for
phenomenological reflections on epistemological difficulties in the application of
the postulate to interpretations of all social interactions.
Two steps in the methodological procedure required by the postulate of adequacy
must be distinguished. The first step is the construction of the ideal type that implies
the interpretation. The material basis of this “construction” is the pre-scientific
second-order (and perhaps also first-order) understanding of social scientists. The
methods for constructing first empirical and then ideal types have been considered
at the beginning of this section. The second step is essential for the epistemological
problem of a possible confirmation or disconfirmation of the interpretation in the
social sciences as empirical sciences. The difficulty is that such “interviews” have a
structure that must be distinguished from the structure of diagnostic dialogues, i.e.,
dialogues that can be applied in psychological research interested in the reactions
of the participants to their social environment, because such dialogues presuppose
already established interpretation schemes for social interactions, e.g., schemes
determining psychoanalytic approaches in the diagnosis.
In contrast, the dialogue of the social scientists with the participants in a system
of social interactions has to be a productive and not a re-productive dialogue, and
first of all not a diagnostic dialogue. The goal of the dialogue is the discovery and
possible elimination of misunderstanding and not-understanding. In such interviews
social scientists have to explain their theories in “simple” terms before asking
whether their clients agree or disagree. Since the explanation is already a part of a
process of productive interpretations in dialogues, it is possible that the participants
in the interaction will agree simply because the explanation has explained to them
what they are really doing and consider their own former self-understanding as false.
But they may also agree or disagree because they misunderstood the explanation.
Finally, the outcome will be a more or less radical mutual not understanding if
the religious, ideological, or even scientific categorial systems of the construction
of the ideal type and the self-understanding of the participants and/or of different
participants in the same system of interactions are incompatible.
The process of the communication between researchers in the social sciences
and their objects has not reached its end after a confirmation or disconfirmation
of the proposed interpretation of the participant’s first-order understanding of the
social interactions. Critical reflections have to keep in mind what has been said in
Sects. 10.2 and 10.3 about the results of research in the systematic human sciences,
and especially in the social sciences, as factors in the set of initial conditions
of events in future social interactions. A theory in the social sciences based on
326 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

empirical social research is itself a factor in the development of practical social

interactions in the future. It is a factor because it is able to predict the effects
of the introduction of adding or removing efficient causal factors that can cause
improvements or avoid damages. The factor in question is external for the rational
practical social interaction as an object of the observations of social research.
However, it is an internal factor in possible communications between participants
of the observed interactions and the social scientists as observers. Presupposing this
along with what has already been said, it is possible to summarize the viewpoints
that are necessary for a more detailed explication of the requirements for being a
“disinterested observer” in the empirical sciences.
Research in the empirical sciences presupposes a theoretical interest in methods
that are able to confirm or disconfirm theorems that are derivable from theories.
The applications of such methods require practical actions and/or interactions of
researchers, e.g., the interactions of experimental research. The applications of
the methods and the practical interactions connected with them must be separable
from all further interests in applications of confirmed theories for inventions of
technological means that can be used in practical interactions, i.e., interactions that
are guided by an interest in the realization of objects that serve certain practical
purposes. The theoretical interest requiring “disinterested” observers is disinterested
in technological application of the theories.
Disinterested research is only possible in a discipline in which theories and the
practical application of the theories in technologies are separable. Such separations
are possible in a science if the methodological abstraction that includes the
region of the objects of the science in its residuum excludes practical interests in
realizations of objects that presuppose technological applications of the theories.
Such methodological abstractions are possible if they determine a distance between
the subject, i.e., the concrete person of the researcher as the actor behind the
cognitive and practical activities of theoretical research, and the ontological realm
of the objects of research.
The presuppositions for the constitution of such a distance are conditions that
are pre-given in specific temporal structures of the relation between the cogitative
types and the objects given in these cogitative types. Research in the natural
sciences is separated from the realm of its objects because what the methodological
abstraction that is constitutive for the natural sciences includes in its residuum is
nature given as a universe existing in the medium of an objective mathematically
explicable time/space continuum given for the researchers in the natural sciences.
As a transcendent object, this time/space continuum transcends the continuum of
the intersubjective temporality of researchers and with it all practical interests in
realizing objects of possible in-order-to motives.
The first canon of the philological-historical method separating interpretation
and application separates the social context of the historians and the context of
the objects of historical research. The separation is a methodological abstraction
that has its one-sided foundation in the passively pre-constituted temporal distance
10.4 The Social Sciences 327

between the experience of past and present reality in intersubjective temporality. The
temporal structures that determine research activities in the social sciences imply
two temporal perspectives. The social sciences can be considered as an annex of
social history, i.e., as the attempt to develop a classificatory system of different
empirical and then also of ideal types of systems of social interaction based on
historical experience. For this perspective, as in history, the present only occurs as
a limit of the empirical basis of research. The situation is different for the temporal
perspective of empirical social research that is first of all interested in the present
as the center of its research. The historical past is only of interest insofar as it is
relevant as the past horizon of the present.
The universe of the objects of social research, the social interactions with
participants interested in the goals and means of the interactions as the objects
of social research, and social research itself coexist together in the same present.
The question is whether or not and how a methodological abstraction that can be
constitutive for a strict separation between the social researchers, on the one hand,
and the objects of research, on the other hand, is possible for this perspective of
the empirical social sciences. This question is not a question for a “phenomenology
of the social world.” It is a question for a phenomenological epistemology of the
empirical social sciences. Relevant for an answer to this question is the following
summary of the descriptive analyses of basic structural aspects of empirical research
in the social sciences.
(1) According to the principle that only everyday experience can serve as the
foundation of conceptualizations and theory-building in the social sciences only
the present situation of social research can serve as the empirical basis for
the abstracting and constructing of ideal types or constructions in the social
sciences. According to the outcome of the preceding analyses of the pre-
scientific first-order and second-order understanding of social interactions, this
means that social researchers are in themselves participants in these interactions
in the beginning. However, the attitude of a social scientist who wants to
be a disinterested observer presupposes a methodological abstraction. This
abstraction has to bracket all interests implied in the first-order and second-
order understanding of interactions from the cognitive attitude.
(2) As objects of eidetic abstractions and constructions “ideal types” are
a-temporal. The cognitive attitude in which ideal types are given requires a
methodological abstraction that includes in its residuum only material and
formal essences. The methodological abstraction excludes objects given in
materially empirical reality. Excluded are, hence, all practical interactions
that are interested not only in the realization of objects and states of affairs,
but also in discovering real objects that might serve as efficient means in
a process of the realization. The phenomenologist who has a theoretical
interest in a “phenomenology of the social world” is, therefore, in this sense a
disinterested “observer” of ideal objects. It is of epistemological significance,
328 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

that (2) admits a meaningful explication of the postulate of adequacy. A

description of ideal objects in general, and especially ideal types, can be called
adequate if contemporaries starting with a similar material basis for variations
in imagination, the same cogitative types, and the same thematic attitude accept
the assertion that a given description of an ideal structure is intuitively evident.
(3) Research in the empirical social sciences is, however, first of all interested
in testing whether the interpretations that can be derived from the empirical
or ideal types can be confirmed or disconfirmed in present observation of
real social interactions. These observations require active communications and
interactions with participants who are involved in the systems of practical
interactions under investigation and these communications are themselves a part
of the system of communications in a society with empirical social sciences.
It is prima facie tempting to call any propositions used in predictions based
on previous experiences or derived from interpretations of social interactions
“adequate” if they are confirmed. “Adequate” in the sense of (2), however, is
an epistemological term for degrees of evidence in intuitions of a-temporal
ideal objects. A proposed empirical thesis or theorem that is now accepted as a
confirmed proposition can be disconfirmed in the future. The meaning of “ade-
quate” in the sense of “confirmed” in the context of (3) must be distinguished
from the meaning of “adequate” in the context of (2). It is, therefore, inadvisable
to use the term “adequate” in epistemological and methodological contexts in
which “to confirm” refers to real events that have been expected in the future of
a past now and can be observed in an actual now.
(4) It has been mentioned above that a present publication of results of research
referring to presently given events in the systematic human sciences will itself
be one of the initial conditions in causal connections that can be of significance
for further predictions of future events. In other words, it is possible with
a publication of results of social research that the objects of research, i.e.,
participants in social interactions, recognize what is published as a correct
analysis of their own situation. Since they are interested in correct predictions of
all events that are relevant for the realization of their purposes, they will modify
their interactions according to the predictions of the theory. The practical or
civil system of interactions that is guided by the interest in the realization of
a purpose is in such cases itself an experimental test of a prediction that has
been derived from a theory published by the scientists and accepted by the
“objects” of the theory. The consequences can only be spelled out in detail
after an analysis of the epistemological problems of economics, the law, and
political science. They are of basic practical significance for the whole society;
they refer to rational ideal types, i.e., theories of rational behavior governed by
the application of causal relations; and especially in economics they admit the
application of mathematics.
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 329

10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions

in the Lifeworld

Economics, originally a discipline of practical philosophy,79 emerged as an

empirical science in a cultural lifeworld in which technologies that were developed
with the aid of the natural sciences had already replaced many of the pre-scientific
techniques used in practical social interactions. Of interest for economics as
an empirical science are practical social interactions considered as economic
interactions guided by the purposes of the production and trading of goods and
of materials for production. What has been said about technology and practical
social interactions in the preceding sections will be presupposed for the following
analyses. Trading goods, etc., in the cultural context of lifeworlds with natural
sciences and technologies presupposes a market economy with a developed
monetary system. Since the sixteenth century economic systems of this type have
been of vital significance for the increase of wealth, and with it the distribution
of political and military power in and between states in the age of absolute
monarchism.
Reflections of a phenomenological epistemology on the methods of empirical
economical research must take into account that the empirical base of such research
was and is restricted to this type of an economic system because only this type
was and is given for empirical economical research in the present for societies with
natural science. Economic research interested in the phases of the generation of the
economic systems before the advent of a fully developed market economy has to
presuppose the methods and results of historical and ethnological research.
Epistemological reflections on the methodology of empirical economic research
require an analysis of the static structures and the generative levels of the develop-
ment of a market economy with a monetary system. The first task is an analysis of
the necessary dependent parts in the whole of the static structure of the ontological
region of the empirical basis of this research. The initial step of such an analysis is
to determine the static and generative structural aspects of the ideal type “market
economy” that justify the interest in predictions of economic developments, and
beyond that the application of mathematics in the definition of the basic ontological
categories of this ontological region.
According to a widely accepted though rather inadequate slogan, a discipline
is an empirical science only to the extent to which mathematics is applicable in the
discipline. Mathematics had already been applied in pre-scientific techniques used in
practical interactions on the level of elementary understanding, and this application
was one of the generative foundations for the emergence of the hard natural sciences.
The application of mathematics in the hard natural sciences requires that the basic
categories of the science can be defined in terms of mathematics. The “conditions of

79
The author of the first book on economics in the Aristotelian tradition was probably Theophras-
tus. Latin translations with some extensions existed since the first half of the thirteenth century.
330 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

the possibility” of this application of mathematics have been considered in Part III.80
Economics is a systematic human science admitting an application of mathematics
that is prima facie similar to the application of mathematics in the hard sciences.
The application of mathematics to objects of an ontological region presupposes
definitions of the basic categories of the region in terms of mathematical equations
and must be distinguished from the application of mathematical statistics in the
probability calculus.81 The application of mathematics to ontological regions refers
to objects and relations between objects in the region. The application of mathe-
matical statistics in the probability calculus refers to the probability of predictions
and differences of the statistical weight of the efficiency of factors in the ensemble
of antecedents of predictions. Statistics and the probability calculus are, therefore,
also applicable in the “soft” life sciences, in the historical human sciences, e.g.,
philology,82 and in the systematic human sciences, e.g., psychology.
The main epistemological task is, hence, a phenomenological analysis of the
foundations, the “necessary presuppositions of the possibility” of the application of
causal explanations and mathematics in the theories of economics as an empirical
social science, and this task requires a precise explication of the generative and
static structure of the ideal type “market economy.” Seen from the viewpoint of
economic research and economic theories, such an explication would merely be
a trivial re-definition of basic economic concepts in the terms and context of the
phenomenological analyses of practical and civil social interactions in the lifeworld.
However, the purpose of these considerations is not to enhance economic research.
The first task is to determine the specific ideal types of practical social inter-
actions that serve the production of artifacts as goods, the exchange of goods,
and the application of technologies in the production of goods. The second task
is to prepare the ground for a phenomenological solution of the epistemological
problem of the necessary presupposition of the possibility, and the foundations of
the applicability, of mathematics in economic theories, determining “its scope and
its limits.” This solution should be also able to determine the difference between
the application of mathematics in the hard natural sciences and in economics as an
empirical systematic human science.
A sketch of the basic structures of archaic economies and the generative
foundations of economies applying technology in the practical and civil interactions
of monetary market systems is necessary before turning to the phenomenological
analyses of the epistemological problems of empirical economical research. Two
types of social authorities can be distinguished in such systems of social interac-
tions, the authorities determining the process of practical interactions serving the
production of goods and the authorities determining the distribution of goods and

80
Cf. for the following Sects. 8.2, 8.3, 9.1.
81
Mathematical statistics can also be applied in the definitions of the categories of a region in the
hard natural sciences, e.g., in the statistical theory of gases and then in quantum theory.
82
Simple statistical investigations, e.g., for determining the frequencies of words used in a text, can
be hints for the solution of the problem of identifying authors of texts.
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 331

sources for production within the community of participants in the interactions. The
leaders of practical interactions in pre-scientific cultural contexts are the experts, the
“masters of the craft,” who know that and how the applied techniques work and how
to use them. Their leadership is recognized as legitimate leadership because of their
success in practical social interactions in the encounter with the natural environment
in the broadest sense.83
The authority of experts in social contexts of practical interactions can be, but is
not necessarily, identical with the authority for the distribution of the products, the
goods. The distribution of goods in archaic communities in which the participants
in practical social interactions are more or less identical with the community of
consumers was the task of the “political” authority of the head of the family
or the clan, and was guided by the rules of customs. The original owner of the
products produced by the participants in practical interactions is the community of
participants. There can be some kind of ownership of certain tools and weapons used
by individuals on this first-order level of the development of practical interactions,
but there is no private ownership of goods in such contexts. However, this does not
mean that all participants have an equal access to the consumption of goods. Some
have privileges that others do not have.
In more fully developed economic system, distribution of goods outside the
clan, one’s own archaic community, was in further developed economical systems
possible in interactions of individuals exchanging goods, commodities. Such trade
interactions are second-order practical interactions that are one-sidedly founded in
the first-order practical social interactions of the production of goods. Barter in and
between archaic social communities is the exchange of surplus products or goods of
a community with surplus goods of another community.
Developed market economies presuppose techniques and then technologies that
are able to promote the production of artifacts for trade. The systems of means
of production that can be observed in empirical economical research have been
and are one-sidedly founded in presently available techniques and technologies.
Social history shows that early types of practical social interactions using only pre-
scientific techniques in the production of artifacts are already perfect examples of
ideal types of rational behavior in social interactions. The elementary understanding
of such practical interactions implies the understanding of efficient and final
causality, and it is able to apply arithmetical and geometrical techniques wherever
the materials found in the natural environment admit measurement techniques.84
The experts in practical interactions using techniques in pre-scientific contexts
are the above-mentioned “masters of the craft.” The experts in practical interactions
using technologies in cultural contexts with developed natural sciences are engi-
neers. Like the masters, engineers know that a technology works and how to use
it, but they also able to explain why and how the technology works. This ability
presupposes expertise in the results of research in the natural sciences and this

83
More will be said about practical social interactions, techniques, and technology below.
84
The results of Sects. 8.3 and 10.2 are presupposed in the following analyses.
332 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

expertise permits the application of such results not only for the enhancement of
already used techniques and technologies, but in and, beyond that, the systematic
search for technological innovations.
The methods as well as the empirical basis of the observations of empirical
economics presuppose a cultural lifeworld with natural sciences. Social structures
determined by practical interactions applying only pre-scientific techniques are
possible objects for social history, but they never have been and never will be
possible objects for empirical economical research in the present. They might be
objects for ethnological research, but like research in social history, this research
will first of all be interested in the interpretations of the mythological contexts of
higher understanding that “explain” the techniques given in first-order elementary
understanding. This is one of the reasons why empirical economic research could
only emerge in a period in which the means of production for products presupposed
technologies. Technologies are only of immediate significance not only as effective
causes determining the structures of the production of goods, but also as effective
causes determining changes in the development of social structures in the system of
means of production.
Natural science is able to predict how a given technology is able to realize this or
that purpose. It is also able to predict to what extent the application of the technology
will cause desirable or harmful changes in the natural environment. Economic
research is first of all interested in the present social structures of the community
of the participants in practical interactions that are determined by the application
of certain technologies. Meaningful predictions referring to the course of events
in economic structures that are determined by means of production are possible in
periods without significant changes in the natural environment or changes caused
by inventions of new technologies.
Given such situations, empirical observations that explain partial social struc-
tures of different systems of practical social interactions are possible for observers,
who are not involved in the practical interaction itself. The application of experi-
mental methods is possible because observations of the actions of participants in
practical interactions admit the interpretation of such observations as observations in
experimental situations.85 The task of the following analysis is the explication of the
generative and static structures that are implied in the ideal type “market economy.”
And, as indicated, the analysis of this ideal type is necessary to prepare the ground
for an epistemological justification of the application of causal explanations and
mathematics in economics.
Setting aside changes in the natural environment inventions of new techniques
and technologies are able to change social structures of entire systems of the
production of commodities in a market economy. Natural sciences are able to
predict possible technological innovations and the consequences of the application
of such inventions for the natural environment. However, they are not able to

85
An observation of a technology that “works” in an interaction confirms a hypothetical prediction
that it will also work in realizing a purpose in the future.
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 333

predict the economic and general social consequences of the application. Empirical
economic research is neither able to predict future innovations nor able to offer
theoretically justifiable hypothetical predictions about the economic success or
failure of innovations and of the social changes that will be the effects of the
introduction of a technological innovation.
It is indeed possible to give a more detailed account of circumstantial conditions
in the past horizon of the actual present, and thus after an innovation happens
economics is able to offer with hindsight plausible explanations how and why
such economic and social changes happened after the application of technological
innovations. But no reliable theoretical analysis of the initial conditions of the
situation in which a new technology is applied is possible. Predictions are possible
in case of small enhancements that trigger small changes in the circumstantial
factors of the situation. Real innovations like the invention of the steam engine cause
“industrial revolutions.”
The first step in the development of trade systems beyond archaic economical
structures is the production of goods not for consumption in one’s own community,
but only for exchanging them for goods (not yet for money on this level) produced
elsewhere. Trade in general is the second-order civil interaction of the transaction
of goods that are products of first-order practical interactions. Trade as barter then
comprises the second-order civil interactions of professional traders who exchange
products or goods for products or goods. A series of such transactions starts with
acquiring products from producers of commodities and ends with exchanging the
commodity with a consumer for some other products. Trade implies the separation
of production and consumption. Trade is, hence, a second-order mediating civil
social interaction that is one-sidedly founded in first-order practical interactions,
the production and the consumption of goods. Mediating practical interactions
are, like other practical interactions, originally understood in first-order elementary
understanding.
Products acquired from the producers in exchange for other products produced
by other producers are the property of the trader until they are traded in for other
products. This intermediate property of traders is now abstract individual private
property and this type of property consisting of things neither used nor consumed
by the owner is only given as a dependent part in the system of a market economy.86
The immediate purpose of trade interactions for the merchants as participants in
the interaction is to provide support for their needs and desires in trading some of
the goods in their possession for goods that can be used for their own consumption.
This type of civil interaction implies the possibility of increasing the wealth of the
traders, i.e., the amount of goods in their private possession that can be used, but

86
An economic liberalism presupposing the quasi-metaphysical principles of isolated “free”
individuals as original economic actors and private labor as justification of ownership is, seen
from the viewpoint of social and economic history, a myth. Individual ownership makes sense only
on the level of the trade of products in a market economy. A feudum in feudalistic societies was
not understood as private property in this sense.
334 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

are not yet used, in exchange for goods for consumption. Trade in general offers
additional87 and effective possibilities of raising taxes for the support of the political
power of governments. Rather complex systems of this kind existed long before the
emergence of economics as an empirical science. The significance of a developed
market economy not only as a system of the distribution of goods and wealth but
also for the distribution of power and for legitimate lawgiving will be considered in
the next section.
The last step in the generation of the foundations of a market economy is
the development of a monetary system for purposes of the mediating practical
interactions of trade, including the trading of money for money, of lending and
borrowing. The participants in the mediating practical interactions of early market
economies used measurable units of rare materials, e.g., gold, as standards for
measuring the price of the value of goods. Paper money is a last step leading to
a fully developed market economy, a step that reveals, quite apart from its practical
advantages, the abstract mathematical character of the category “market value” as
a measuring rod for the value of commodities at different times and places. The
participation in market interactions required, hence, skills in arithmetic as well as
algebraic techniques and techniques of measuring all factors in other interactions
that can be of significance for the calculation of the price of commodities. In other
words, all categories that can be of significance in the context of a market economy
must have definitions in terms of mathematical formulas.
These techniques of reckoning and measuring are given for the participants in
market interactions in first-order elementary understanding and then partially in
higher understanding. The progress of mathematics on the level and in the medium
of the elementary understanding that had to be applied by the merchants had
been taught by the “masters of reckoning.” For them mathematics was not yet an
abstract academic discipline requiring the theoretical cognitive attitude of a science.
However, the development of mathematical skills in the context of early market
economies was one of the foundations for the emergence of modern mathematics as
a science and its application in the methodology of the modern empirical sciences.88
This short “history” of the generative foundations of the region of objects for
economical research already indicates the difference between the application of
measuring and arithmetic to objects given in the natural environment of first-
order practical interactions and to objects that are given as merchandise in trade
systems. Objects given in practical social interactions in the encounter with the
natural environment are objects used as tools or produced in first-order practical
interactions, either for consumption or as tools in other practical interactions.
Such objects have as purposes or realized purposes values with different material

87
The simple form of raising taxes used by administrators of political power is the immediate
confiscation of goods from the producer of goods and “delivers” in turn the promise to defend the
producers – and later in addition the merchants – against “illegal” violence from outside and inside
the community.
88
Cf. Sect. 8.3.
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 335

qualities. The material quality of value pertaining to a desired object is an intrinsic

abstract property as a dependent part of the object as a whole. Purposes that can
be realized in first-order practical interactions and the finished products of such
interactions are valuable objects because they are the objective correlates of desires.
Some desires and their correlates are needs. What needs and their correlates are
is given in animalic understanding. Other desired values are the values of tools
and materials needed in first-order practical interactions. They are given in the
intentional acts of elementary understanding. Some values belong to objects of
higher understanding, e.g., aesthetic values of a poem or the religious value of a
cult.
The first step toward an application of mathematics in practical economic social
interactions in the market, and then in economics as an empirical human or cultural
and not natural science, is barter. An object O is a concrete first-order whole given
in elementary understanding as an intersubjectively given object in practical social
interactions.89 Objects are, as such, physical things. A person P is also given as
an object that represents the Other, and the Other is originally given as a living
animate body.90 Objects (including other persons) that are given in cogitative types
implying practical interactions are given as measurable and countable objects (n)O,
(m)O, where n, m, : : : are numbers. The ability to count collection of objects
or to measure the weight or the size of objects has its original foundation in
techniques used in practical interactions. Techniques of counting and measuring
objects were essential tools for determining the quantities of exchanged objects in
trade relations.91 Objects of this kind are originally given as purposes of practical
interactions. Realized purposes are desired objects, and objects are desired because
they have an intrinsic value, iv. Objects can have iv as Oiv only as materials for
or as products of first-order practical interactions. Objects can have in addition a
value in second-order practical interactions in which objects obtain a trade value
tv. An object has tv as Otv only at the time at which it is traded for Oiv in a
transaction. An analysis of the structure of secondary practical interactions, i.e., of
trade interactions, must start with the simplest structure. The simplest type of trade
interactions is barter.
Barter is a reciprocal relation of a higher order between two three-placed
relations, the asymmetrical relation between two persons P1 and P2 and an object O.
P1 is in one direction or perspective of the reciprocal relation of a higher order the
buyer of an object O2, and P2 is the vendor of O2. P2 is in the reciprocal opposite
direction the buyer of O1, and P1 is the vendor of O1 in the other perspective.

89
The formal-ontological terminology used in the following analyses is the terminology of the
phenomenological theory of the whole and the parts introduced in Sect. 2.2.
90
What has been said in Sects. 3.1 and 3.2 is presupposed for the understanding of “object,”
“Other,” “intersubjectivity,” and related terms.
91
What will be said in the following passages of this section about quantification, counting, and
measuring of objects that are given as first-order wholes in elementary understanding presupposes
the analyses in Sects. 8.3 and 10.1.
336 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

P1 desires the object O2 with the intrinsic value Oiv2 for consumption. In its relation
to O2, P1 is a consumer. P1 is furthermore the producer of O1. P1 offers his O1 for
the desired Oiv2. P1 is willing to give O1 because P1 does not desire O1. O1 has,
hence, for P1 only the value of “can be given for something else,” but this implies
that in the perspective of P1, O1 has only a trade value tv and is, in short, an Otv.
Given the reciprocal character of the barter relation, it follows that O2 has the trade
value tv and O1 the material intrinsic value iv for P2. Seen from the perspective of
P2, O2 is an Otv. In barter trade, the trade value Otv is always the trade value of
different objects for different persons.
The first presupposition for trading in market interaction in general is the
invention of objects Otv that have the function of representing the trade value for
all other objects that have an intrinsic value iv for all persons that are interested
in trading objects. Such intersubjectively given objects admitting the objective
identification of tv presuppose the trade transactions in the market as a system of
interactions between participants exchanging objects in transactions mediated by
identifiable and quantifiable physical objects Otv. The invention and introduction of
independent objects Otv is the static and generative foundation for the development
of market economies. The smallest partial model of such a system is a trade
interaction with three participants,92 two persons P1 and P2 and in addition as
a mediating third person the merchant Pm. P1 desires O2, but P1 now not only
represents the production of a valuable object O1. He is in addition also the owner
of an Otv. Pm owns O2 and is willing to give it to P1 for an Otv that is in this context
a physical and identifiable bearer of the trade value of O2 for Pm, but also for P1 in
Pm’s secondary understanding of P1. Pm and P2 are able to get involved in a trade
interaction with the reverse order of O1 and O2 mediated by a third object Otv.
It is, furthermore, essential for the difference between barter interactions and
transactions on the one hand and trade interactions and transactions on the other
that barter requires an immediate interaction of P1 and P2 at the same time in the
same place. Even the smallest partial model of the ideal type “market interaction”
already admits that there is no immediate interaction between P1 and P2. There are
only immediate interactions between P1 and Pm and between P2 and Pm, and each
of them can take place at different times and places.
Market interactions in general, including the smallest partial model of trade
interactions in a market, do not only require that Otv is given as an identifiable
physical object. It is also required that Otv can be used as a measuring rod
of tv for all possible objects with an intrinsic value iv, i.e., the value of a
commodity for consumption, offered for transactions in the market. The countable
or measurable quantity of objects O1 and O2 in their function as Otv in barter
trading is incommensurable because O1 representing Otv for P1 is different from
O2 representing Otv for P2. If a quantifiable Otv is pre-given, however, all quantities

92
The simplified general model is not a theoretical construction. Merchants selling and buying
merchandise at the door to interested persons and trading in the general store in a small village are
concrete instances of the formal structure of this model.
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 337

of objects with an intrinsic value for possible consumption will have a quantifiable
counterpart Otv and vice versa. The quantity m or n of Otv for which an Oiv can be
bought as a commodity is the cost for the buyer. The quantity of Otv for which an
object with iv is offered to be sold by the vendor is the price of the commodity.
Note that Pm was the owner of O1 and O2 before the two transactions of O2
and O1 to P1 and P2 took place, and after the two transactions Pm is the owner
of n C m Ovt. Pm is, hence, able to buy O10 and O20 not only from other P1
and/or P2, but also other producers, or even other merchants beyond the structure
of the smallest partial model. The trading interactions between Pm, P1, and P2
can begin again, but such continuation implies the possibility of a transition to
the market economy in which objects are given as products and commodities for
participants that interact as buyers, vendors, producers, consumers, and merchants.
The chain of trade interactions and transactions of objects, of commodities, starts
with a producer who offers a product for a chain of merchants as a commodity for
possible consumers. The chain ends with the last buyer, i.e., the consumer or user of
the commodity.
Quantities of units of Otv are “running around” between the participants of this
extended model of the ideal type “trade in a market economy,” and these quantities
can be called quantities of a currency. Currencies must admit intersubjective
measuring and counting in equal units. Quantities of units of Otv are quantities of
the money used as currency in a market system. These units are units in which the
trade values of quantities of objects with intrinsic values, the commodities or goods,
can be measured. Objects without an intrinsic value or quantities of such objects
have no trade value at all. The trade value of a trade object Otv, i.e., money for its
owner is, hence, only that the owner is able to exchange it for all kinds of goods. In
addition, units of Otv can have an intrinsic value in their own right as the correlate
of the desire of some individuals, such as people like the value of a gold coin for
a goldsmith, but this intrinsic value is not a part of their function, the measuring of
the trade value of objects with an intrinsic value vi. There are objects such as paper
money that serve as Otv, yet have almost no intrinsic value at all.
What production and consumption and hence what producers and consumers are
can be already understood in the first and second-order elementary understanding
of the participants in an archaic economy, and it is also understood on this level that
producers are in need of consumption and consumers have to produce in order to
be able to consume something. It is understood on the same level of understanding
by participants in a market economy that the “production” of merchants is not a
production, but the transaction of goods. It is also understood that merchants, like
all other participants in the system of economic transactions are also consumers who
need resources for buying the commodities they need.
Merchants must, last but not least, take into account that their interactions
and transactions in a market presuppose the transportation and storage of the
merchandise. Transportation and storage of goods are specific types of practical
interactions that have their costs like all other first-order practical interactions. There
are, furthermore, the time, the efforts, and the skills of merchants organizing the
transactions of the commodities. Merchants have to add all these costs to the costs
338 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

of buying products from the producer or commodities from other merchants in the
calculation of the lowest price for which they can sell the merchandise to potential
producers without losses, and hopefully with profits.
This is only one set of factors in the calculations of the price for potential buyers
by merchants. There are other factors that are of significance for the price that
potential buyers are willing to pay for commodities that are offered on the market.
The price of commodities that is acceptable for buyers can change, and such changes
are caused by different effective conditions in different situations. The effectiveness
of the factors in a certain situation can be measured in the increase or decrease of
the turnover of the commodity that is offered at a certain price. Such factors are first
of all the relation between quantities of potential buyers and the quantities of the
desired commodities that are offered for trade at a certain time in a certain place.
Of significance is, secondly, the quality of different commodities. For some types
of commodities the quality is immediately measurable in units of Otv. A commodity
that can be used by the consumer for some purposes, including the purposes of
practical interactions in the production of goods over a longer period of time than
another commodity that is designed for the same purpose is of a higher quality
because it will be able to save costs for the consumer of the commodity. Two other
types of factors that are able to determine the quantity of consumers interested
in buying certain commodities cannot be calculated in advance because they are
not, taken by themselves, measurable. There are first psychological factors such as
taste that determine the quality of satisfaction in the process of the consumption
of a commodity. There are secondly, the factors connected with the distribution of
political power, factors that will be considered in the next section.
Throughout the history of market economies it was the goal of merchants to
increase their wealth, the amount of available money, and objects that have only a
trade value. The source of the increase of their wealth always was and is the ability
to avoid losses and to be able to sell their merchandise with a profit, i.e., for a
price in units of Otv that is larger than the sum of the costs of the merchandise for
the merchant in units of Otv. The rational behavior that is required for reaching this
goal includes first of all the skill of experienced merchants, supported by the masters
of reckoning, to measure and to calculate quantifiable factors and to estimate the
impact of the unquantifiable factors on the quantifiable factor price in transactions.
The structures that have been considered above are structures of the ideal type
of a market economy as an extension of “archaic” economies, e.g., the economy
of medieval feudal society. Two additional structural extensions are necessary for a
fully developed modern market economy and must be taken into account before
turning to the epistemological problem of the justification of the application of
mathematics in economics as an empirical science. The first is the analysis of the
definition of practical interactions in the production of commodities in terms of the
categories of a market economy. The second is the transaction of money for money.
(1) Production of artifacts, goods in a fully developed market economy, presup-
poses the technological application of theories about efficient causal rela-
tions borrowed from the natural sciences and restricted to the production of
commodities for the market. Presupposing this context, all factors that are
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 339

necessary dependent parts in the process of the production of goods can be

re-defined in terms of the categories of market interactions and transactions.
Factors that have to be re-defined are the causal factors in the process of
practical interactions that have been mentioned at the beginning of this section:
(1.a) the material found in nature or already prepared in earlier practical
interactions for being used in further practical interactions are the material
causes; (1.b) the tools, i.e., the machines provided by the technological skills
of engineers; and (c) the labor, i.e., the time participants use to contribute their
efforts in the process of the practical interaction and the skills of the participants
in using the technologies.
These factors can be treated as marketable objects, i.e., as objects that have
an intrinsic value only in the process of practical interactions, but can also be
offered for a certain price on the market. For the producer of the product, this
price is as a part of the cost of the production. The sum of all of these costs for
the process of production, plus the costs of the transaction itself, is the cost of
the product. All aspects and factors of the practical interaction that are guided
by the purpose of the production of products with a certain intrinsic value
are reduced to the basic categories of the economical system of the monetary
market economy.
(2) Productions of marketable products and the transactions of products have their
costs according to (1). Producers and also merchants in a fully developed market
economy who do not have a sufficient amount of the money required for their
productions or transactions are able to buy money and to promise the vendor,
who is in this case a banker, to pay back the price for the money they bought
plus interest later. Interest is a share of the profits they are supposed to make
with the business that has been subsidized by the banker.93 The extension (2) of
a market economy with a developed monetary system is the financial market,
a market without objects with an intrinsic value. Only money is traded for
money. Objects with an intrinsic value appear only in the fringes of a financial
market, but they are, nevertheless, the essential foundations of a fully developed
market economy as commodities for consumers and as production means for the
producers. No such objects occur in the financial market. Here there are only
units of Otv exchanged for units of Otv and there are no limits for ingenious
arithmetical and algebraic constructions, the so-called financial “products,” of
the participants in this market.
The preceding descriptions have been restricted to the analysis of the structures
and generative foundations of the economic interactions that are already given
for the ideal type of a first-order elementary understanding of the participants in
these interactions. The task of these descriptions was to prepare the ground for the
explication of the epistemological justification for the application of mathematics in
economic theories.

93
Charging interest is shunned in certain religious contexts, but a Muslim banker has to make profit
somehow, regardless of how this will be done and explained in Muslim theology.
340 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

Like all other systematic human sciences, economic research presupposes

methods of secondary understanding, of interpretation. What is understood in the
interpretations of economics is the first-order elementary understanding of practical
interactions of the participants in the interactions. Phenomenological reflections on
the epistemological problem of the justification of the application of mathematics in
empirical sciences have to presuppose the results of the phenomenological analyses
of the generative foundations of mathematics as a formal science, namely, the pre-
scientific basic arithmetical and geometrical skills in practical interactions and trade
interactions (Sect. 8.3).
The epistemological reflections have to begin with reconsiderations of the
transaction of units of Otv for units of Otv in financial markets. The use of units Otv
in market structures in which Otv is applied as a means to enhance transactions of
objects O with an intrinsic value iv is in brackets on the level of the financial market.
Left in the residuum of this abstraction are only units of Otv that represent numbers
and operations with numbers. This abstraction is pre-given for economic theories as
an essential aspect of the participants’ first-order understanding of their interactions
and transactions in a market in which money is traded for money. The first task
of economic research as social research is the interpretation of both the practical
social interactions of the participants in a monetary market economy and their first-
order understanding of their interactions. The condition of the possibility of the
application of mathematics in economics as an empirical science is, hence, that
the pre-scientific first-order understanding that participants have of their interaction
already implies the first-order givens of enumerable units of Otv and arithmetical
operations applied to units Otv.
The ability to apply mathematics not only in all practical interactions and
transactions of objects in the market, but also in all practical interactions producing
objects as commodities for the market implies the possibility of abstracting from
all Oiv and of defining them solely in terms of prices and costs as units of Otv.
A quantity of units Otv, i.e., an amount of capital, measures the trade value of
a quantity of objects with an intrinsic value only at the time and the place of
the transaction. This aspect is of basic significance for economics as a science,
but economics also includes an interest in material factors of the empirical basis
of the abstraction. Objects with intrinsic values are in most cases products of
practical interactions that realize a certain purpose in the encounter with the natural
environment with the aid of efficient means for realizations. Though it is possible to
define the whole process of first-order practical interactions in terms of transactions
in a market system of trade interactions, such definitions imply in the definiendum
values, purposes, and the first-order elementary and higher understanding and
second-order understanding of the participants in the practical interactions of
productions and interactions in the market. An epistemological justification of the
application of mathematics in economics as a systematic human science requires an
explicit analysis of this foundation of Otv in Oiv.
The next questions that have to be considered after the question of the jus-
tification of the application of mathematics in economics are questions about
the possibility of testable predictions, perhaps even “experiments” in empirical
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 341

economic research. The general key for the solutions of the epistemological problem
of the possibility of predictions in the social sciences is the construction of ideal
types. The abstract ideal type “rational social behavior” has been characterized
in the previous section as behavior that is guided by choices of effective means
for the realization of a pre-given purpose regardless of whether or not the choice
of the purpose is itself rational in some other sense. Practical interactions of this
type imply predictions, and predictions imply knowledge about causal relations.94
The causal relations presupposed in predictions can in addition be defined in
terms of mathematical equations if the underlying data referring to observables are
measurable.
Engineers applying technologies for the realization of their purposes presuppose
theories of the hard natural sciences about causal relations that can be defined in
terms of mathematical equations. The rational social behavior of participants in the
practical interactions of a market economy can be interpreted as a mathematically
guided rational economic behavior. The purpose of economic interactions is
determined by the value of “calculable increase of wealth” or “maximizing profits”
of a pre-given amount of Otv, of capital. It is possible to assume in addition that it
is natural for certain systems of purposes and values, certain worldviews, to assume
that there have to be (at least in the last instance) private individual owners of capital
or shares of capital. This and other assumptions about ownership imply, however,
assumptions about laws and lawgiving that are not of significance for the problem
of possible economic predictions with and without the application of mathematical
methods.
There might be, furthermore, good reasons guided by ethical or other viewpoints
for judging that to choose this purpose as the leading maxim for all actions is
not quite reasonable for individuals or groups of individuals. Essential for the
viewpoint of epistemology is, first of all, that the value determining the purpose
of the interaction admits increase and decrease in degrees of measurable quantity.
Behavior is rational if it serves this purpose and it serves it if it is guided by
mathematical calculations of the price of the traded objects and the costs of the
material, the tools, and the labor of the participants in the process of the production
of the goods.
This explication of “rational” is an interpretation of an ideal type of the elemen-
tary understanding and self-understanding of the participants in market interactions
in economics as an empirical science. It is an interpretation, but the thesis that
an epistemology of economics can be reduced to a hermeneutics, a methodology
of understanding the social world, is misleading. Of additional significance this
case are specific structures of social interactions in a market economy.95 The

94
Cf. Sect. 10.5.
95
Cf. Gary Brent Madison 1997 about such attempts in the literature. See now also Staudigl 2010.
Economics is not of interest for the authors of the essays in this volume. Of interest is for such a
reduction of understanding sociology is only what can be said about music, literature, interpretation
of social activities in everyday life, etc.
342 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

methodology of interpretations of systems of economic interactions presupposes

an ideal type of a first-order understanding that is interested in discovering efficient
causes and reliable predictions as well as applications of mathematical calculations
that can be used not only for testing predictions, but also for explanations of
developments in the past. This interest is already an essential partial structure of
the first-order understanding that merchants and bankers have of their practical
interactions, and not a methodological invention of economics as an empirical
science. Economics is able to apply mathematics because the objects of economics
apply mathematics in their practical interactions, and this is the “hermeneutical”
epistemological justification for the application of mathematics in economics.
It is true that purposes and the relevance of causal relations for the realization
of purposes are in brackets under the abstractive reduction of the natural sciences.
“Increase of wealth” is, however, though quantifiable, a value that determines the
purpose of trading goods in a market economy. The causal relations that realize
the increase of wealth as a purpose can be calculated if quantified data about the
supply of and the demand for commodities are available. In the process of trading
commodities, demand is ultimately determined by the material values determining
the purposes and the needs of those who are able to acquire goods for consumption.
The quantifiable factor of supply is in the last instance determined by the sum of
the costs of the materials, the tools, and the labor in the process of the production of
goods.
Two types of factors in this structure are of significance for the difficulty of
deriving reliable predictions in empirical economic research regardless of whether
mathematical models can be applied in the description of relevant factors or not:
(1) changes in the objective conditions of the production of goods and the cost of
the production of goods and (2) problems in the definition of “increase of wealth”
in its quantitative representation and in its relation to other values and purposes
in a lifeworld. The problems (1) have already been mentioned at the beginning
of this section in the analyses of the significance of techniques and technologies
for first-order practical interactions. They are also relevant for answering questions
regarding the difference in the justification of the applicability of mathematics in the
hard natural sciences and in economics. What is of interest for (2) will be relevant
for the transition of the analysis from the distribution of wealth to the analysis of
distribution of power.96
(1) Practical interactions in a market economy presuppose the production of goods
and are, hence, one-sidedly founded in practical interactions that produce mar-
ketable products. Changes in the structure of the foundations change the initial
conditions for the mathematical models that determine economic predictions,
but they cannot be predicted in the mathematical models of economic research.
The changes in the initial conditions are of significance for changes in the costs

96
Reflections about such distributions are, however, already reflections on civil social interactions.
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 343

of the materials, the tools, and the labor of the production of goods.97 Such
changes are (1.a) changes in the conditions of the applicability of technologies,
and (1.b) changes in the conditions and quantifiable aspects of the production
of goods for a market economy caused by technological innovations, including
technological innovations in the techniques of the transportation of goods. In
both cases (1.b) as well as (1.a), changes in the economic structures are caused
by efficient factors that can be explained in the natural sciences, but neither (1.a)
nor (1.b) is relevant for predictions of economic and social consequences and
the cost/price relations of the economic application of mathematics.
Some concluding reflections on the meaning and significance of the application
of mathematics in the natural sciences and in economics are, hence, necessary. The
pre-scientific epistemologically relevant foundations of the development of basic
arithmetic in elementary understanding for purposes of trading products are not
different from the pre-scientific epistemologically relevant foundations presupposed
in the development of advanced techniques in practical interactions.98 What is
measured and what is a possible object of economics as a systematic human science
is, however, not a possible object for the natural sciences even including the life
sciences. What prices and costs are cannot be understood without referring to
purposes, values, efforts, elementary understanding, and secondary understanding
of the lived experience of other persons. All of this is, however, already in brackets
already the first abstraction of the natural sciences. What is measured and counted
in the hard sciences under the second abstractive reduction and in economic
interactions and economy as a science is, hence, toto genere different because the
regional categories are toto genere different.
Mathematics in the hard natural sciences is, furthermore, not applied to the cat-
egories of an ontological region of objects that are given for a primary pre-scientific
first and second order understanding and then for systematic interpretations of
this first-order and second-order understanding. In the case of the hard sciences,
the application determines categories of a first-order higher understanding of the
categories belonging to the ontological region of nature under the first and the
second abstraction.99 Nature as an object of scientific higher understanding is only
given, after the abstraction, as the region of everything that happens regardless of
whether it is desired or not. It is that which is present in elementary understanding
only as brute and not-yet-understood reality.
The “objects” of economics and in general in the systematic human sciences,
are interactions of “subjects” who have already understood what they are doing on
the level of elementary understanding. The claim of the systematic human sciences,
and especially of economics as a science is that they better understand what their

97
What follows is an application of what has been said about the relevance of external factors for
practical social interactions to economic interactions.
98
Cf. Sect. 8.3.
99
Cf. Sects. 3.4, 8.3, and 8.4.
344 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

“objects” are doing in their interactions. That “better understand” means first of all
that they are able to predict and explain states of affairs that are not yet understood
in their “objects” elementary first order and second order elementary understanding
of their interactions.
There are, furthermore, essential differences in the epistemological structure of
the predictions of future events based on mathematical calculations in the natural
sciences and in economics as a systematic human science. The predictions of the
natural sciences are not immediately of technological interest, and it makes no
sense to assume that they are of interest for the self-understanding of the objects
of the natural sciences. The predictions of economics are, on the contrary, of
immediate interest for the “objects” of economics, the participants in the market
economy, and they are, therefore, also immediately of “technological” significance.
In the case of the natural sciences it is possible to distinguish between “pure”
science and scientifically guided technology. However, results of economic research
are immediately applicable in the practical interactions of the participants in the
market. Economists are, therefore, immediately consultants of business leaders and
of politicians who are interested in raising taxes and the gross national income as an
essential tool for the administration and distribution of power. As a social science,
economics is a theory that as a theory of practical interactions is immediately
itself of practical significance for practical interactions precisely because it can
be understood by participants in practical interaction as a theory of their practical
interaction.
A final remark about the ideal type of the system of social interactions in a market
economy and the homo oeconomicus as the ideal type of “perfect” participants in
this social system is necessary. According to the explication and partial critique
of the theory of ideal types of Schutz, the homo oeconomicus is the ideal type of
participant in the market economy. Understood in this sense, it would not be nice to
refer to the homo oeconomicus using Schutz’s term homunculus and to understand
this term in its original pejorative Latin meaning. The homo oeconomicus is rather
the ideal type of a perfect professional ideal of a perfect merchant, banker, or
businessperson in general, regardless of whether they learned the art and necessary
knowledge of their profession from masters, including the masters of reckoning in
the sixteenth century, or acquired their knowledge studying business administration
in a university. There is, however, also another “participant” interested in the
increase of wealth in a market economy: the state. Economics considered from this
point of view is political economy. Except for the remarks below in (2), a thorough
epistemological account of political economy presupposes viewpoints taken from
epistemological reflections on the science of the law and political science, and these
will be considered in the following sections.
(2) Two types of problems in the first-order understanding of the highest purpose
“increase of wealth,” vulgo profits, and its interpretation in economical
research can be distinguished. (2.a) Some parameters for increases and
decreases of wealth that are relevant for the determination of the universal pur-
pose guiding economic interactions are not mentioned in the usual definitions
10.5 Economy as the Region of Practical Social Interactions in the Lifeworld 345

of “increase of wealth.” Given a certain quantity of increase or decrease of

wealth, nothing is said about the parameters of the increase or decrease. Some
people prefer to earn high profits in a short time, others prefer lower profits
earned over a long period of time. Some persons are inclined to take high risks
of possible losses for chances of gaining large profits. Others prefer to avoid
risks and to be satisfied with small but secure profits. Some are inclined to
change their strategies if others are changing theirs. Others stick more or less
stubbornly to their strategies. An accumulation of such types of behavior in
a critical phase of the development of the market economy triggered by the
inclination to imitate what most of the others do can be a significant factor in
the development of a financial crisis. Social psychology is able to discover the
motives and inclinations behind such types of partially “irrational” behavior
of participants in economic interactions.
(2.b) The rationality of rational economic behavior as an ideal type is rational
because it requires criteria for the selection of means that can be understood as
efficient causes for the realization of the “increase of wealth” as the highest
purpose of economic interactions. It is, however, questionable whether the
choice of this purpose is a rational choice for purposes of the “pursuit of
happiness” for individuals or for other values guiding social interactions
interested in promoting the commonweal, such as justice, fairness, and respect
and sympathy for the needs and desires of other persons.
The highest purpose of social interaction following the principle of rational
economic behavior is not violated if it can be realized for some subgroups of
participants in social interactions at the cost of a minimum increase or even a loss
of wealth for other groups. The immediate psychological reactions in such situation
can be envy and anger, and it is again social psychology that has the methods to
measure such reactions and to try to predict the consequences for individuals and
society. There is, however, more involved in this case than just blind subjective
feelings and inclinations governing reactions to critical situations.
The fact that an increase of wealth for individuals and/or small groups beyond
a certain limit always has consequences for the distribution of power in a society
will be considered in the next section. Of immediate significance for economics is
that the reaction to the feeling of being a victim of gross injustice in the distribution
of wealth is aggression; such aggression can cause social disturbances, and these
disturbances can be of immediate consequences for the distribution of power and as
a consequence the distribution of wealth. The secondary understanding presupposed
in such cases in psychological investigations has to include the understanding
of purposes guiding social interactions beyond the sphere of economic social
interactions. It has to start with interpretations of the first-order understanding of
purposes and values guiding social interactions in the realm of the distribution of
power, e.g., justice and fairness. Social interactions belonging to this realm can be
called civil social interactions.
Economics by itself is not able to answer the question whether the highest
value guiding rational economic behavior is itself able to be the warrant of the
346 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

commonweal and of distributive justice and fairness as values that are able to
determine the purposes of civil social interactions. Some but not all groups in
the society experience the “freedom of the market” as a blessing. Seen from an
epistemological point of view, the thesis that only interactions guided by the purpose
of realizing the value of “increased wealth” are able to warrant the balance, or at
least to correct imbalances, of wealth in the society is neither a truth a priori nor has
it a high a posteriori probability. The assumptions that the striving of all members
of the community to realize the highest value of the market implies the realization
of distributive justice and that it is “natural” that all members of the society are
able to follow the inclination to be a rational egoist without being plagued by other
inclinations presuppose the metaphysical assumption that nature is kind enough to
be the best of all possible natures.

10.6 From Jurisprudence and the Science of the Law

to Politics and Political Science

The science of the law (sometimes followed by political science) is usually

mentioned at the end of the list of the systematic or social human sciences ever
since Dilthey. This ranking is prima facie acceptable in the context of the analyses
of the last section because legal and political civil interactions refer to and have,
hence, their foundations in economic social interactions. However, there are also
difficulties. It is questionable why and how the law can be understood as an
empirical science together with psychology and economics because even superficial
reflections already reveal differences in the generic structure of the history of
economics and the history of the law.
Only scattered treatises on economics can be found in the pre-scientific philo-
sophical tradition of Classical Antiquity. Economics did not belong to the “higher
faculties” and was only of marginal significance as an academic discipline in the
artes liberales in the Middle Ages. It emerged as a science in the eighteenth
century and was from its very beginnings understood as an empirical science like
physics, chemistry, and the life sciences. There are, on the contrary, many systematic
treatises on the law, lawgiving, and politics in the philosophical tradition of classical
philosophy. Jurisprudence as a profession was of outstanding political significance
in late Classical Antiquity in Rome. The faculty of the law was one of the higher
faculties in the medieval universities and remained in high esteem as an academic
discipline before and after the recognition of empirical psychology and economics
as empirical sciences in the modern academic world. It was, furthermore, never a
disputed question whether and how jurisprudence ought to or can adopt methods
borrowed from the empirical natural sciences, or whether it somehow admits the
application of mathematics or at least statistics, in order to be recognized as a
respectable academic discipline.
10.6 From Jurisprudence and the Science of the Law to Politics and Political. . . 347

Facing these problems, it can be useful to have a look at Kant’s description

of the situation of the academic disciplines at the end of the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth century. He distinguished in the doctrine of the law,
between jus, i.e., the doctrine of the positive law, and the science of the law, the
scientia juris. The jurist as a jurisconsultus has to know the pre-given and presently
enforced system of positive law. The jurisconsultus can be in addition a jurisperitus
who is experienced in the application of the law to concrete cases. The ability to
apply the law presupposes prudence in the application of the law, juris prudentia.
Jurisprudence is, hence, prudence and not a science. The science of the law (scientia
juris) excludes all the aspects of jus just mentioned and is restricted to the analysis
of the principles of natural law, jus naturalis.100 Traces of this Kantian division and
its consequences can be found in the Neo-Kantian tradition. It was and is possible in
this tradition to deny that jurisprudence and the science of the law can be recognized
as empirical human sciences.101
However, contrary to the original meaning in Latin and in Kant, in most
dictionaries “jurisprudence” is understood as term for the science of the law.102 It
is recognized that the application of the law requires more than just knowledge of
the law, but jurisprudence as the science of the law is understood as the science
of the system of positive law and this science presupposes juridical hermeneutics,
and includes the history of the law as a science of understanding, not as a
science of causal explanations.103 It covers, hence, the doctrine of the law, i.e., the
doctrine of the jurisconsultus, but not the scientia juris in the Kantian division of the
doctrine of the law.
Defenders of this understanding of jurisprudence can be found in the tradition
starting with Dilthey, but also in the phenomenological tradition in the investigations
of Adolf Reinach, Alfred Schutz, and Felix Kaufmann. According to this tradition
jurisprudence is not a science of explanations interested in causal connections, but
a science of understanding. The history of the law and juridical hermeneutics are,
hence, the necessary methodical tools for the interpretation of the law. Since the
interpretation of the law is the task of jurisprudence in the present, it is a systematic
or social human science.
The opposition between the human sciences as sciences of understanding and
the natural sciences as sciences of causal explanations (an opposition that is
presupposed in reflections on the methodology of jurisprudence in the wake of

100
Kant KGS VI, Metaphysik der Sitten Einleitung in die Rechtslehre §A. As metaphysical
principles of the doctrine the principles of the “natural law” are, of course, in need of a
transcendental deduction from the principles of practical reason in the specific context of Kant’s
transcendental philosophy.
101
See, for instance, Grünewald 2009, 31f., 46.f., who excludes jurisprudence and the science of
the law together with theology and philosophy from the list of the human sciences.
102
See Schutz 1967, 138, 242, 246.
103
Cf. Schutz 1967; 247f., on Kelson and quoting Kelsen. The problem of modern law positivism
and different philosophical theories of natural law will be considered below.
348 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

Dilthey) has already been rejected in the preceding sections. There are, however,
additional difficulties for jurisprudence. First of all, it is necessary to emphasize the
differences between the methodology and the objects of interpretation in economics
and in jurisprudence. The objects of interpretations in economics are rational
practical social interactions. The secondary understanding of fixed life expressions
are only occasionally of significance for such interpretations. However, the law is
pre-given for the interpretations of jurisprudence as a fixed life expression. The
immediate object of the interpretation is a text, and this interpretation presupposes
knowledge of the history of the development of law texts.
Following Kant and others, jurisprudence is furthermore not restricted to the
methodologically guided interpretation of law texts as fixed life expressions. It also
includes the task of the application of the interpreted texts to presently given cases
and is in this respect prudence. Persons are called prudent in their actions in social
interactions if they consider all relevant real factors and possible evaluations of the
presuppositions and the consequences that are relevant for the action before acting.
Seen from an epistemological point of view, the prudence in jurisprudence that is
required for the application of the law presupposes the intention to consider all
results of empirical research and the interpretations of the testimony of witnesses,
etc., that determine “what was/is the case,” to apply interpretation of the text of
the law that has to be applied to the case (an interpretation that is correct in every
respect), and to prepare the application of the law with the aid of correct interpre-
tations of all relevant precedent cases of the application of the law to similar cases.
Seen from this point of view, jurisprudence is not a science but it presupposes the
results of other sciences, first of all juridical hermeneutics but also other empirical
sciences in the investigations that have to determine “what was/is the case.”
This account of the scope and limits of jurisprudence as a science has been
challenged. The difficulties started with the deconstruction of Dilthey’s claim that
traditional hermeneutics can serve as a methodology and thus as a warrant of
the intersubjective validity of research in the human sciences. This deconstruction
presupposed the thesis of the inseparability of interpretation and application. The
thesis and its consequences need further analyses because the implied deconstruc-
tion of validity in interpretations also has uncomfortable consequences for the
interpretation and application of the law in jurisprudence.
Facing these problems, a phenomenological epistemology must start from
scratch with the analysis of the abstract morphological ideal type “civil social
interaction” as a basic categorial structure of the ontological region of a social
lifeworld in general. The ideal type of a social lifeworld along with its political
structures (structures that are partially determined by written laws) can then be
analyzed as a special case of the abstract morphological ideal type of systems of
civil social interactions in general, i.e., including social lifeworlds without a literary
tradition. The question whether and how this ideal type of a pre-scientific first- and
second-order understanding can be understood as a rational ideal type determining
rational choices is of central significance for epistemological reflections on the
interpretation of the law in jurisprudence and of systems of legitimate lawgiving
in political science.
10.6 From Jurisprudence and the Science of the Law to Politics and Political. . . 349

Systems of civil social interactions presuppose systems of practical social

interactions as their foundation because they have to be applied to practical social
interactions and animalic social interactions. The general principle guiding purposes
of civil social interactions is to avoid conflicts between participants in the same
or in different systems of practical social interactions belonging to the level of
first-order animalic understanding, elementary first-order understanding, and even
higher understanding. To avoid conflicts, this highest level of universality includes
the possibility of a violent elimination or suppression of the defenders of certain
positions in such conflicts.
Commands are civil social interactions forbidding or requiring the participation
of at least one individual person in certain practical or civil social interactions
in the present. Rules as civil social interactions are generalized commands that
refer to classes of actions. The purpose and in-order-to-motive of a rule for civil
social interaction is, hence, the prohibiting, requiring, or permitting104 of certain
practical or other civil social interactions, including, of course, the purposes of these
interactions.
The realization of the purposes of rules presupposes the announcement, the
“publication” of such purposes in a social community. Such an announcement is
a rule or a command. The question of the rationality or reasonability of a system of
such rules is, therefore, a question of the principles of systems of the second-order
purposes of civil social interactions that are announced in rules. Rules referring to
purposes of civil social interactions are verbal public announcements prohibiting or
requiring certain practical social interactions or the use of certain means used in
social interactions that cause conflicts in systems of practical interactions. But the
realization of the purpose of the rules also requires its own means.
The means to realize the purpose implied in the rule is the promise of sanctions,
i.e., punishments for performing prohibited interactions or disregarding required
practical interactions in the future as a necessary dependent part of a rule as rule.
The warrant for keeping the promise that is given in the present is the power of
those who represent the rule as actors to enforce the rule in the future. The power to
give rules and to enforce given rules requires resources that can only be produced
in practical social interactions. Apart from brute animalic violence, the political
power behind rule-giving and the administration of rules is one-sidedly founded in
resources provided by available techniques and technologies and economic practical
interactions. The rule-giving and enforcing for civil social interactions also has,
hence, a material foundation in systems of practical social interactions because the
resources of the power necessary for enforcing the rules can once again only be
found in systems of practical social interactions.

104
Permitted are in general all social interactions that are not required or forbidden by the law. The
definition is negative but precise under the additional formal assumption that a system of laws has
to cover the ground of all social interactions.
350 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

The abstract structure just considered of the ideal type of a civil social interaction
in general105 pre-determines the special ideal types of different empirical types
of pre-historical, i.e., pre-literate systems of customary laws. The ideal type of a
civil society with a developed system of written laws and its political structures is
another special case of the abstract structure of systems of civil social interactions
in general. The additional generative foundation of the emergence of systems of
civil social interaction based on law systems in the usual sense is the development
of a written tradition.106 Myths were the source of the justification of rules and
the authorization of rulers for the system of customs in cultures without a written
tradition. The written law emerges, therefore, in cultures with a written tradition
in the early phases of the development of law systems in the context of religious
literature that then additionally provide the authorization for the power of lawgiving
and enforcing the law.107
A system of civil social interactions based on a system of written laws requires
the interpretation of the text of the laws as a presupposition for the application
of such laws. Epistemological reflections on jurisprudence must, therefore, start
with analyses of the epistemological problems of juridical hermeneutics of present
law texts and the history of the law requiring the interpretations of law texts
of the past. Civil social interactions in societies under a system of customs are
social interactions guided by rules, and the principle of the rules is to eliminate
conflicts. Laws are written rules, but they offer as such the possibility of systematic
distinctions between different genres of the law. It is possible to distinguish between
actions and interactions that violate given laws prohibiting, requiring, or permitting
certain interactions, on the one hand, and conflicts between participants in the same
or different systems of social interactions, on the other hand, i.e., between the penal
and civil law. It is, furthermore, necessary to distinguish between systems of private
social practical interactions and large-scale systems of social practical interactions
run by the government.
Essential in this respect are first of all the laws that determine the system
of revenues of the states and their internal and external power, last but not
least the power to enforce the decisions of the courts of law. All of this is, of
course, of significance for empirical research in political science as viewpoints for
distinguishing different empirical types and ideal types of states and law systems.
It is also of basic significance for the system of genres of the law in different types
of law systems. But the distinction between different types of systems of law and
different genres of the law in a pre-given system is, following the principles of

105
Systems of civil social interactions that are not determined by written laws still occur in societies
with an otherwise developed system of written laws, e.g., in educational contexts, but also in the
social relation of a coach and the members of the soccer team, etc.
106
Cf. Sect. 3.4.
107
God is in the last instance the lawgiver in monotheistic religions. The emperor has this function
as the son of heaven in the tradition of the Chinese legalists. The Greeks and others opted, however,
for a human lawgiver, e.g., Solon, with partial support of the gods.
10.6 From Jurisprudence and the Science of the Law to Politics and Political. . . 351

hermeneutics as a methodology of interpretation, of central significance for juridical

hermeneutics and the history of the law. The knowledge of the jurisconsultus
who is able to interpret the meaning of the positive law is, hence, a necessary
epistemological presupposition for the prudent application of the positive law to
particular cases in jurisprudence. Thus it is necessary to distinguish between two
different meanings of the science of the law. There is first of all the Kantian meaning
of a science of the law a priori as the law of nature or the law of pure practical
reason, i.e., of a specific type of the philosophy of the law, but there is also the
science of the law understood as an empirical science of the interpretation of law
texts.
A final remark about problems that are not of immediate significance for
jurisprudence, but of central significance for the transition from jurisprudence and
the science of the law to politics and political science must be added before returning
to the central methodological and epistemological problems of jurisprudence and
the science of the law. The field of possible applications of a developed law system
is the region of civil social interactions. Here practical social interactions are only
of interest in their connections with civil interactions. The system of civil social
interactions connected with practicing the law has two inseparable and correlated
subsystems: (1) the subsystem of civil interactions connected with the application,
i.e., the administration and enforcement of the law, and (2) the subsystem of civil
interactions connected with lawgiving. The whole system is self-referential because
the civil social interactions in the subsystems have to obey the laws that have been
designed for the elimination of conflicts in these subsystems.
Two sub-subsystems can be distinguished in the first subsystem: (1.a) the
administration of the law in the application of the law passing sentences for pre-
given concrete cases in courts of law and (1.b) the administration of enforcing
the sentences. Setting aside the task of determining “what is the case,” the first
of the two sub-subsystems of the first subsystem is the domain of jurisprudence
in the narrower sense as the interpretation and the application of the law. Since
laws have been designed for and have to be applied to conflicts in subsystems (1.a)
and (1.b), the subsystem (2) is relevant for both and is self-referential for its own
administrative procedures.108
This self-referential system (2) always additionally implies elements of systems
of higher understanding because the power behind the enforcement of the law as
well as lawgiving is in need of legitimating justifications that have to be recognized
by all, by the judges, by the administrators of the law, by the lawgivers themselves,
and by all “law-abiding” citizens. Since the scope of higher understanding includes
systems of religious dogmas, systems of philosophical theories, and even more
or less scientific theories about human nature, such implements of the higher
understanding of legal social interactions can be of central significance in disputes
about lawgiving on the level of higher understanding.

108
The sovereign is in such systems also “under” the law.
352 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

Such disputes belong to the science of the law in the above-mentioned Kantian
sense and not to jurisprudence in the narrower sense. They will be considered
in the next section. The domain of law, and this is the upshot of the preceding
considerations, is coextensive with the domain of civil social interactions and their
foundation in practical economic interactions in the social lifeworld, and therefore
with the domain of politics as an object of political science. Contrary to political
science, however, the task of the law is first of all not a contemplative theoretical
account of political structures; instead, it serves as a system of norms, a guideline
for civil interactions separating what is required, what is prohibited, and what is
permitted.
Applications of the law belong to the juridical civil social interactions in the court
of law, i.e., to the sub-subsystem (1.b). Lawgiving (2) is not, apart from an exception
that will be considered below, a business of the court of law and jurisprudence. What
has to be applied and interpreted is positive law, i.e., the system of law texts that are
presently relevant for the application of the law to cases in courts of justice.109
The methodical tool for the interpretation of positive law is juridical hermeneu-
tics supported by the history of the law and the history of the law presupposes the
interpretation of law texts that have been applied in the past and also juridical
hermeneutics. It is of epistemological significance that the history of the law,
including interpretations of laws that have been but are no longer applied can serve
as a prototype of the separation of interpretation and application for philological-
historical research. The history of law systems offers additional viewpoints for the
interpretation in the present, but this is not a surprise. All systematic human sciences
as sciences of the present have to apply the results of the corresponding branches
of research in the historical human sciences not only for the interpretation of the
understanding of the past generative horizon of the present situation, but also as a
material basis for the variations in imagination that are required for the constitution
of ideal types.
The methods of juridical hermeneutics for interpretations of present and past
positive laws are the methods of general text hermeneutics, the knowledge of the
grammatical rules, the terminology, the stylistic idiosyncrasies of the language of
the law, but first of all the interpretation of the genres of the law. Of interest are the
specific structures of the genre “law text” along with its species in penal law, civil
law, etc., and the consequences of the structure of this genre for the hermeneutics of
style and terminological systems on the level of lower hermeneutics.
A text belongs to the genre “law text in general” if it fulfills the following
requirements. The first requirement is that a text is a law text only if it determines
norms for what ought not to be done, what ought to be done, and what may or
may not be done in social interactions. The second requirement is that a text is a
law text only if it determines a sanction for violating the norms in the case of the
penal law or a decision about what ought to be done in cases of the civil law. The

109
The term “positive law” is relevant for practicing jurisprudence. Law positivism is a position of
philosophical reflections on the science of the law in Kant’s sense.
10.6 From Jurisprudence and the Science of the Law to Politics and Political. . . 353

third requirement demands that the sanction or decision ought to be a consequence

if the result of the first requirement can be applied to a case, i.e., if the case can be
subsumed under the universal norm of the law.
The main methodological problem of juridical hermeneutics is that the method-
ological criterion of objective validity for philological-historical interpretations,
the first canon of hermeneutics, cannot be used in juridical hermeneutics. The
application of the canon is impossible because its application presupposes a
temporal historical distance between the context of the interpreter and the context of
the text, but jurisprudence and the science of the law, have like the other systematic
human sciences, the center of their interest in present phenomena. There are,
however, other criteria that can be added to juridical hermeneutics as a doctrine of
methods, and these criteria are constitutive for the jurisperitus, the one who knows,
who is experienced in the law. This experience includes the systematic investigation
of the applications of the positive law to cases in the past horizon of the present as
well as their significance for the objective meaning of a law, and beyond that, for
the law system to which this law belongs.
The definition of jurisprudence as science of the law is, hence, defensible even
in the context of Kant’s definition, because the jurist practicing jurisprudence in
applying the law to a case in the present ought to be a jurisperitus, the one who
knows the law, including the range of the possible consistent applications of the
law. What must be added to the interpretation of the text of positive laws in
jurisprudence in this sense are interpretations of civil social interactions that have
been the consequence of the application of the law in the immediate past horizon of
the present. Jurisprudence was, therefore, understood, and can be understood, as a
systematic social science and not a historical human science because the center of
its task is the interpretation of the present positive system of the law.
Everything that has been said about juridical hermeneutics and the interpretation
and application of the law up until now was never challenged in principle until the
second half of the last century. The new and now widely accepted thesis of Gadamer
was that the inseparability of interpretation and application in juridical hermeneutics
can be used as a prototype for a hermeneutics in general as a hermeneutics of truth,
and this thesis has already been discussed in the context of the epistemological
problems of the historical human sciences in part II. The thesis implies that the
methodological search for criteria of objective validity in interpretations is futile.
An immediate consequence is that validity in historical research is suspicious for
fundamental ontological reflections on the method of the human sciences as a
method for the dis-covery, the Ent-deckung of Truth. The answer given in Part II
was that the first canon of hermeneutics, and with it the separation of interpretation
and application, can serve as a warrant of possible objective validity in philological
hermeneutics and philological-historical research, including reconstructions of a
past reality.
Here what has to be admitted is that a separation of interpretation and application
was indeed impossible in literary traditions without a developed methodologically
guided hermeneutics, in short, in pre-scientific literary traditions. What has to be
admitted is, furthermore, that the methodologically guided approach always has its
354 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

generative foundation in pre-scientific literary traditions, and the warrant of truth

and falsity in such traditions is the tradition itself. Finally, it has to be admitted
that the required separation of interpretation and application, of the horizon of the
author and the interpreter, is indeed impossible for interpretations of present life
expressions of authors in the present and for contemporary history in general. The
basic epistemological problem for interpretations in the systematic human sciences
is that they are not able to apply the first canon and have to look for other criteria
that might be able to serve as criteria for the confirmation or disconfirmation of
interpretations.
The thesis that the alleged unity of interpretation and application in juridical
hermeneutics can serve as the prototype for text hermeneutics in general causes
difficulties for the methodology of philological-historical research. Ironically, it
also has uncomfortable consequences for juridical hermeneutics, jurisprudence, and
the belief that it is at least possible for a court of law to reach intersubjectively
acceptable and in this sense objectively valid decisions. A solution for this episte-
mological problem requires a phenomenological analysis both of the structure of the
application of a law to a case in a court of law as a specific ideal type of civil social
interactions and of its specific methodological significance for possible predictions
of future events and explanations of past events.
The first aspect of this structure is that the judge has to start with an interpretation
of the law as a universal norm, but this interpretation implies the application of
the law to a concrete case. Application is an inseparable part of the interpretation
of law texts because the meaning of law texts implies that law texts have to be
applied to cases given in present experience. Interpretation and application are,
however, inseparable only in this sense in juridical hermeneutics and jurisprudence.
The consequence is that a decision of a court of law that can be recognized as
approximately “objectively valid” requires, in juridical hermeneutics, the systematic
investigation of interpretations and applications of the positive law to cases in the
presently given past horizon of this decision. The inseparability of interpretation
and application in jurisprudence implies, furthermore, that a decision of a court of
law about a case determines, according to the law, certain civil social interactions
in the future horizon of the decision. This “prediction” of future interactions is not
based on effective factors produced by the case, i.e., the social interaction to which
the law is applied. The prediction in the present “announces” the realization of
a promise that will be executed by a political power that has the efficient means
for the enforcement of the promised sanctions or other decisions of a court of law
prescribed by the law.
The unity of interpretation and application is, hence, according to the preceding
analyses, more than an armchair reflection of a scholar and interpreter as defender
of a tradition about the application of the interpreted truth of a text in the present
situation. The ideal type of the application of the law in the decision of a court of
law is a civil social interaction and is followed by a sequence of further civil social
interactions that have been pre-determined in the decision. The interpretation of the
law in jurisprudence is not an interpretation in the theoretical attitude of philological
and historical research satisfying the methodological criteria of objective validity.
10.6 From Jurisprudence and the Science of the Law to Politics and Political. . . 355

Instead, the interpretation of the law requires prudence in the application of laws
as universal guidelines for civil social interactions in a practical cognitive attitude.
There are two epistemic requirements for prudent interpretation/application of the
positive law to specific cases.
(1) The first requirement is that the application of the law in a court of law is
restricted to whatever is assumed to be true in court about what was the
case. What is assumed to be the case is the assembly of “facts,” the state of
affairs of the case, to which the law is applied. The case to which the law is
applied is the fact for the court of law. But the fact for the court of law that
determines the decision of the court is not necessarily identical with the facts
that “were really the case.” The fact for the court is, hence, an interpretation,
a historical narrative based on research about what has happened. Seen from
an epistemological point of view, it is of central significance that history as the
reconstruction of a past reality is a science because a historical reconstruction
can be falsified.
The question “what was really the case” is the root question of all investigations
that are historical in a broad sense. It has been shown in Sects. 5.5 and 6.5 that
the methodological criteria for decisions of questions of the type “what was really
the case” in historical research include and presuppose methodologically correct
interpretations of fixed life expressions. It has also been shown that in a lifeworld
with sciences, they include the technological application of the results of the natural
sciences that are necessary for determining evidences for “what was really the case.”
Finally, it is of significance for the prudence of jurisprudence that all statements
about “what was really the case” in history are, according to the methodology of
historical research, always open for “revisions.”
The discovery of new facts or falsifications of parts of the assumed “history” of
what was the case that are relevant for the application of the law require revisions
in earlier decisions of a court of law in the past. It is, hence, the legal duty of those
who represent jurisprudence in a court of law to apply all findings of investigations
about the “contemporary history” of the case including the evidences provided by
the natural sciences concerning the case in question. An interpretation/application
of a law to a “case” that can be recognized later as a state of affairs that “was
not the case” has to be rejected as “false.” This has consequences for the temporal
dimensions in the epistemological meaning and significance of “fact” for history
and jurisprudence on the one hand and for the empirical sciences on the other hand.
The main task of the methodology of the empirical sciences is to guide a type of
empirical research that is interested in the discovery and confirmation of predictions.
History is not interested in predictions because to predict what has already happened
is “countersensical,” does not make sense. The interpretation/application of the law
in jurisprudence is interested in cases that have happened in the immediate past
horizon of a present. Of interest is only what has happened, and not what will happen
in the future if a similar case happens again.
356 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

(2) The second requirement has already been mentioned in the outline of the
basic principles of juridical hermeneutics offered before turning to the general
problem of the unity of interpretation and application for hermeneutics in
general, and especially for jurisprudence and juridical hermeneutics. Juridical
hermeneutics is able to apply the methodical rules of lower hermeneutics and
genre hermeneutics for philological interpretations to the interpretations of
law texts, but it is not able to apply the first canon of hermeneutics as a
criterion of objective validity in interpretations. Individual interpretations of the
original intention of the authors or texts110 need the support of reconstructions
and interpretations of the cultural environment of the author and presuppose,
hence, the first canon of the philological-historical method that separates the
horizon of the author and/or text in the past and the present of the interpreter.
Such individual interpretations are not relevant for the interpretation/application
of positive laws because the application of a law text refers to cases that
are given for a court of law in the present, and not to cases that might
have been relevant for the lawgiver as the author of the law in a more or
less distant past. The methodical rule of the first canon of hermeneutics that
is especially of significance for philological interpretations on the level of
individual hermeneutics is not applicable, and has to be replaced in juridical
hermeneutics by the formal assumption or “fiction” that the intention of a law
as a law, and hence also of the lawgiver, ought to be the commonweal.
Laws of nature are empirical laws that have to prove their objective validity in
their application to cases in empirical reality. Such laws are rejected if cases can
be found in empirical reality that are counter examples contradicting the claim
of universal validity. The laws of jurisprudence determine, on the contrary, not
what is the case but what ought to be the case and sanctions for cases that
ought not to be the case. There are, however, situations in which the interpreta-
tion/application of the law reveals essential aspects of the general problem of the
encounter of jurisprudence with empirical reality. Two ideal types of such cases
can be distinguished, and both admit a critical evaluation of the validity of the
interpretation/application of a law, and of the law itself, in decisions in a court of
law. The epistemologically relevant result of a phenomenological analysis of these
ideal types will be that interpretation and application can be separated and must be
separable in jurisprudence, i.e., the prudence required for the application of the law.
It is a general principle and a requirement for the applications of law systems
that they ought to be logically consistent. There is then in addition the requirement
that the applications of a positive law to a present case ought to be consistent with
its application to approximately equal precedent cases in the past horizon of the
present case. The requirement is immediately derivable from the requirement of
logical consistency between universal statements and their singular instantiations.
Singular cases can be cases of the law as a universal statement only if they have all

110
Cf. Sect. 4.1, 5.3–5.5.
10.6 From Jurisprudence and the Science of the Law to Politics and Political. . . 357

the properties determined in the universal statement in addition to the properties that
are constitutive for their singularity.
The justification of a prudent interpretation/application of a positive law to a
presently given case requires a sufficiently complete survey of precedent cases in
the past horizon of the presently given case. A possible positive result of such a
search that has its empirical basis in a segment of the contemporary history of
jurisprudence is the discovery of precedent cases that are similar to the present
case and justify, therefore, the interpretation/application of the positive law to the
present case. However, it is also possible that the result of the search is negative.
The interpretations/applications of the law in all precedent cases are not able to
justify the interpretation/application of the law to the present case because the
present case is characterized by a set of unique properties that are not consistent
with properties of the precedent cases. All instances of interpretations/applications
of the law to precedent cases are, therefore, not sufficient to “do justice” to the
present case in a court of law. The jurisprudence of the court must in this case
find an interpretation/application of the text of the law that is consistent with the
interpretation of the text of the law and its place in the context of the law system, and
must explain the reasons that justify the deviation of the interpretation/application
of the positive law in the present case from all available precedent cases.
Serious difficulties for the understanding of the difference between the positive
law and the problem of just laws in jurisprudence in law positivism occur if courts
of law have to face situations in which a positive law is obviously “unjust” because
it is incompatible with the dominating consciousness of what is right and what is
wrong, what is recognized as belonging to basic human rights or is immediately
derivable from basic human rights.111 More complex are cases in which not only
are precedent cases missing, but no correct philological interpretation of the text
of a positive law is available that admits an interpretation/application of the law to
a whole class of cases of a hitherto unknown type. The serious difficulties emerge
if the application of a philologically correct interpretation of the text of the law to
such cases is obviously “unjust.” It is an old principle that a law is a just law only
if it is a useful law for the commonweal as a remedy for certain needs of the society
or groups within the society.112 The application of the law in the abovementioned
situations is unjust precisely because just laws are laws that have been given to serve
the commonweal.
The law is obsolete if it is no longer useful for the commonweal. The
philological- historical interpretation of the law reveals that the law is not applicable
because the application presupposes a social context in the past in which the law
was given, but a careful investigation of the presently given cases and their social

111
The confrontation of courts of law in Germany after 1945 with the “positive” laws (and their
principles) that were introduced in the Third Reich is a striking example of such situations.
112
This principle is one of the requirements in the definition of a just law of the Roman jurists.
Cf. Thomas of Aquinas 1882, I. II. qu. 95r, art. 3, objection I on Isidore of Sevilla’s list of such
requirements.
358 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

context shows that this context has changed and that the law is no longer applicable
under the new circumstances.113 Two answers can be given in such situations. The
first is that a court of law has the right to declare that a law is obsolete and then to
modify the meaning of the law and its application. The second answer requires in
such cases that only the sovereign has the right to change the laws and that members
of the court should, as citizens ask the sovereign to do that.
The problems connected with the discovery of unjust and obsolete laws are,
as mentioned, immediately relevant for the general question whether a law is a
just law. They are, therefore, also relevant for lawgiving as a political interaction.
Several types of standards a law has to fulfill in order to be a just law can be
distinguished. Following the levels of generative foundations in the development
of the law, there is (1) the legitimating of customary rules and laws in the non-
literary traditions of mythological narrations. There are (2.a.) the (in many respects
incompatible) standards of literary traditions in the wake of different monotheistic
prophetic revelations and the dogmatic interpretation of these revelations in the
Jewish Talmudic tradition, in the Christian patristic and medieval tradition, and
in the tradition of the Shariah in Islam, interpretations that have been more or
less influenced by (2.b.) the pre-scientific theories of the practical philosophy of
Classical Antiquity. There are finally (3) modern Kantian philosophical reflections
on the problem of an a priori of the practical question of what “ought to be” versus
the theoretical question of “what there is.”
But in addition, there are the above-mentioned pragmatic standards of the Roman
jurists, e.g., the principles that laws are just if they are in accordance with the
customs of the tradition; they have to be useful, properly promulgated, able to
be enforced, etc.114 There are, finally, formal standards, and among them first of
all the requirement that a just law must have been given by a legitimate lawgiver.
Legitimate lawgiving requires in turn constitutional laws for legitimate lawgiving.
Whether a law is a just law in this sense can be decided in a court of constitutional
law, but this implies that it is still the task of jurisprudence and its methods to decide
whether a law is a legitimate law.
Lawgiving is, according to formal standards, the privilege of the sovereign, but it
is not possible to decide from this point of view whether the sovereign can be/ought
to be one person, a group of persons, or all members of the political community,
or what kinds of checks and balances are required for acceptable forms of the
distribution of power of lawgiving, of enforcing the law, of giving commands and
ordinances, etc. Answers to the question of the “best” constitution have been given
in the “science of the law” in the Kantian sense since Plato, together with answers
to the political question of the perfect distribution of political power.

113
It was, for instance, in the United States at the time of the New Deal for the American realists
among the jurists whether a certain law designed for a certain economic situation in the nineteenth
century is still applicable after changes in the economic and social system in the twentieth century.
114
Thomas of Aquinas, 1882, I.II. qu. 95, art.3, objection 1.
10.6 From Jurisprudence and the Science of the Law to Politics and Political. . . 359

It is a basic problem for the methodology and the epistemology of the social
sciences in general whether or not political theories on the level of philosophical
reflections a priori can be and should be replaced by political science as an empirical
human science. The paradigm of such a replacement is the replacement of pre-
scientific philosophies of nature implying principles a priori by the natural sciences.
To choose the first horn of the dilemma implies prima facie the philosophical
position of law positivism. Some remarks about law positivism as the antipode of
the metaphysical treatment of the science of the law will be a useful preparation for
attempts to find an answer for this general epistemological question.
It is tempting to understand law positivism as a branch of modern epistemological
positivism, as a position in the theory of the empirical sciences in general,
because law positivism shares the rejection of metaphysical assumptions a priori in
epistemological theories of the sciences. However, a critical review of this thesis
has to start with the historical observation that the concept of “positive law” is
much older than the use of the term “positivism” for an epistemological theory of
the empirical natural science that was developed in the nineteenth century.115 The
distinction between positive law as the presently applied and recognized system of
law versus natural law was known in the Middle Ages.116 The practicing jurist of
the eighteenth century, i.e., Kant’s jurisperitus, is only interested in the knowledge
of the positive law of the jurisconsultus and not in the metaphysical reflections
of a scientia juris in the old sense.117 Law positivism in this sense is a term that
characterizes the cognitive attitude of the practicing jurist. The problems of a science
of the law with or without principles a priori is of only marginal significance for this
attitude.
Modern law positivism as an epistemological theory adds the thesis that it is
sufficient for determining the meaning of “just law” and “legitimate lawgiving” that
a law has been given according by the actually “recognized” political power fol-
lowing or not following but changing a certain recognized constitutional procedure.
This principle is basically nothing other than an extension of the Roman pragmatic
principle of lawgiving: the will of the sovereign has the power of the law.118 Given
this “way out,” the problem of legitimate lawgiving is reduced to the question of the
political structure of the distribution of power in a state in a certain historical period.
The analysis of such structures is the task of political science. The empirical basis
of the generalizations in political science presupposes historical facts, including the

115
Cf. Sect. 7.2.
116
Cf. e.g., Thomas of Aquinas 1882, I.II. qu. 95, art. 2, objection 2.
117
Cf. Kant KGS VII, Der Streit der Fakultäten, 24f. on the Eigenthümlichkeit der Juristenfakultät.
118
Quod placuit principi legis habet vigorem. A principle of the Roman jurist Ulpian quoted (and
rejected), in Thomas of Aquinas 1882, I.II. qu. 90, art. 1, objection 3. The extension requires only
replacing princeps with sovereign and to admit that, e.g., a parliament can be the sovereign. Well-
known examples for such theories in the science of the law that by the same token are also certain
political theories, e.g., the theories of Thomas Hobbes or, in the twentieth century, of Carl Schmitt.
360 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

facts of contemporary history. This implies that they presuppose the methods of
historical research.
Law positivism is, hence, a branch of historical positivism and, therefore, not
reducible to positivism in the epistemology of the natural sciences as empirical
sciences. But this means that the first epistemological problems are problems
of the methodology of interpretation of fixed life expressions of a past for the
reconstruction of this past reality. What is of interest are fixed life expressions telling
something about the law systems, about the theory and the practice of interpreting
and applying the law, and about the procedures of lawgiving in a particular system
for the distribution of political power. A law positivism that is not able to recognize
the difference between the meaning of “empirical” in the natural sciences and in
the social sciences insofar they are interested in predictions cannot have the last
word in epistemological questions of jurisprudence and the science of law. The real
epistemological problems connected with law positivism are the epistemological
problems of the methodology of history, and behind that, the methodology of the
hermeneutics of fixed life expressions, including then also the problems considered
above of the unity of interpretation and application of texts representing positive
law.
If law positivism is understood as a branch of historical positivism, it is still
possible to recognize that there is a basic norm as a part of the constitutional laws
that determine the objective meaning of legitimate and, in this sense, just laws as
a thesis of legal positivism. To recognize that a law system needs basic norms that
determine what can count as a legal norm in a law system presupposes only the
distinction between the “is” and the “ought,” but nothing about principles a priori of
the “is” and the “ought.” The difference of “is” and “ought” is known in everyday
experience in elementary understanding of social interactions without determining
a priori what ought to be. With respect to the history of the law, this means that
there can be quite different law systems guided by different types of understanding
of basic norms. The assumption of basic norms is, hence, compatible with law
positivism.119
The acceptance of law positivism on the level of the science of law as a theory
that is able to eliminate the problem of legitimate lawgiving and the question
of the requirements of just laws has serious implications for political science.
Law positivism as a theory of the science of law presupposes a political theory
of lawgiving and sovereignty that implies a reduction of questions of justice to
questions of political power. This justification can be immediately combined with
political theories, e.g., with references to the political theory of Hobbes. It is,
however, also possible to assume that the basic norms ought to be justified by an a
priori law of practical reason, or even to assume an a priori access to action guiding
moral, legal, and other objective values a priori. The question is then whether such
an a priori is understood in the Neo-Kantian way as a subjective a priori, or assuming

119
It is possible to characterize the position of Hans Kelsen as belonging to law positivism; see for
instance Grünewald 2009, 32, n. 21, and 108, n. 160, on Schutz and Kelson.
10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law 361

the Wesensschau of the Göttingen “realistic” phenomenology, as an objective a

priori. A different account can be found in the interpretation of Kelsen’s basic
principles by Felix Kaufmann and Alfred Schutz.120

10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law

Political science is, as mentioned in the beginning of Sect. 10.4, more than a
special discipline of the social sciences. It presupposes the general epistemological
structures of the social sciences in general and, in addition categorial structures of
the region of the objects of economics and jurisprudence and their interdependen-
cies. Added is the material category “political power.” The present section must,
therefore, start with an analysis of the foundations of this category in the structures
of the lifeworld in general. This analysis is an immediate extension of what has been
said in Part I, Sects. 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4.
The experience of power, i.e., the potential of using force, of being forced and
resisting force, is an original experience on the level of animalic understanding.
The victim of force or violence is, in the last instance, always the Other as a living
animate body and the correlate of the threat of force on the side of the potential
victim is fear. Power is, in addition, given in elementary understanding if the use of
force is supported by weapons, i.e., “tools” that can serve as instruments of using
force in social interactions.
Power as the power of giving and enforcing rules and commands for Others in
connection with the expectation that Others will probably be obedient is social
power. To have the power to enforce a command or a rule presupposes that the
one(s) who threaten to use force also have the power to apply force. To give a
rule or a command implies that rule-givers and/or those who want to enforce a
pre-given rule promise to use their power to enforce the command or rule if other
persons refuse to obey the rule. The giving of commands or rules and promising
to enforce them, combined with the expectation that consociates are able and
probably willing to obey or to refuse to do so, are civil interactions. The ability
to promise the application of force is also a dominating factor in other “civil”
social interactions, first of all in contracts (i.e., the reciprocal promising of other
interactions) between individuals and groups of individuals. Contracts imply the
will to enforce the promises on both sides, and only a fight can decide which one
of the parties has the power to enforce its “understanding” of the promises in case
of disagreements about a contract. Such conflicts can be eliminated if both sides
recognize a superior authority, e.g., judges or chieftains who have the power to
enforce their interpretation of the contracts and promises in the conflicts.

120
Cf. Embree 2015, chapter 2 “Jurisprudence,” the reference to Schutz 1967 p. 247 on Kelsen; see
also Reeder 1991, xi, for Schutz on Kaufmann.
362 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

Giving and enforcing rules presupposes verbal communications. The ability to

give promises and, hence, laws, already presupposes in these early phases the
development of verbal communication systems in the medium of practical social
interactions in archaic societies. Commands are given for one action in the future
horizon of actual present. Rules are given for a class of present but also of future
social interactions of the same type. Rules are able to survive as useful customary
rules in non-literary traditions only if they are useful for the generation and survival
of systems of customs that are consistent with and useful for the development of
systems of practical economic social interactions. Systems of the rules of customs
have their foundations in practical social interactions or are immediately connected
with such interactions because they are systems of rules that are necessary for a
successful performance of such interactions (Sect. 10.1 and 10.5).
A system of such customs requires as its correlate a system of civil social
interactions of contemporaries who are entitled to enforce the customary rules,
and their request to live according to the system of rules needs the cooperation
of those who are supposed to live according to this system. The willingness to
cooperate without being immediately threatened by the overwhelming physical
power of Others, and without being immediately able to see that the rule is useful
for the social community, requires legitimating. Rules determining the recognition
of the legitimate use of force are necessary for the production of the artifacts, in the
broadest sense, that are needed for the satisfaction of the needs of a family, a clan, or
a tribe. The legitimation for such customary rules will be given in oral traditions of
systems of higher understanding in myths and cults that “explain” the “world order”
and the system of the rules of customs in this order.
In a non-literate archaic social lifeworld, a system of customs, including customs
that determine the right of certain members of the society to enforce the rules of
customs, is pre-given by the oral tradition of the society. According to the analyses
in Sect. 3.2 it is impossible for an oral tradition to identify changes in the tradition
and to distinguish differences in the customary rules of the present and the past.
The judgment of a person who according to the rule of customs is entitled to pass
the judgment that a social interaction violates the rule of custom needs no further
justification in an oral tradition. Speaking through members of the community,
an oral tradition itself passes judgments on improper behavior and demands the
enforcement of the sanctions of the judgment for such behavior. Given is only
the immediate application of the tradition; there is no need for jurisprudence or,
beyond that, for a science of law and it is, hence, also meaningless to distinguish
between a science of the law and political science. In archaic societies with non-
literary traditions, it is also impossible to distinguish between economics, the
law, and political science as disciplines that have to apply different methods and
presuppose each other in various ways as well-defined regions of objects. The
region of systems of civil interactions and of the distribution of social authority
and power in non-literate archaic cultures with oral traditions is the region of
ethno-sociology.
The generative development of the intersubjectively given regions of objects and
of the categories of law and politics presupposes as its generative foundation the
10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law 363

“invention” of written communication bridging spatial and temporal distances. The

tradition and its contents are given in the context of literate cultures in the present in
fixed life expressions, i.e., texts that need interpretations before they can be applied
or rejected in the present.
The pre-givenness of the tradition as a context of texts is first of all of significance
for the development of lawgiving and the administration of the law in jurisprudence.
Law systems first occur on the level of higher understanding in mythical or prophetic
literature in religious contexts. Laws and regulations as objects of interpretations in
higher understanding were then also given later by leaders of states representing
political power for the lower level of practical interactions as regulation of market
transactions, distribution of goods, compensations for damages, and last but not
least, for the purposes of raising taxes and tributes necessary for the support of
political power structures. It is the written law that confronts those who have to live
under the law with the reality of social life on the level of higher understanding
and as an object of higher understanding written law is also a possible object of
methodically guided higher understanding.
This higher understanding occurs, on the one hand, as the requirement of the
professional administration of the law in jurisprudence, but then also, on the other
hand, in philosophical theories interested not only in the pre-given positive law,
i.e., of the written tradition of the law, but also in just and perfect laws and in the
best legal constitution of the state. Reflection on the law on the level of higher
understanding of the science of law in the philosophical tradition immediately
implies, hence, an interest in a theory of the state, the perfect constitution, and
the problem of constitutions in general. Political power beyond social power and
animalic power can only be given in literary cultural traditions with developed law
systems. It is political power because its main function in the society to give and to
enforce laws. The region of political science (but also already of political history) is
the region of political power and of the social systems of the distribution of power.
The distribution of political power and the degree to which political power can be
used inside political communities for purposes of lawgiving and law enforcement
depends on the resources for power-building, and power-building depends on the
development of the economy providing these resources in a social community. The
development of the economy in a social community requires in turn the development
of systems of civil social interactions and of the distribution of power of a higher
degree of complexity, and this also means the development of systems for the
distribution of power. Such systems determine who is entitled to rule and to use
force and who has to obey the rules. The final court of appeal in such systems is the
“ruler over rules,” and this means the one or the ones who are entitled to give the
rules and who is the one or are the ones who ultimately have the power to enforce
the rules.
Since the whole system of practical social interactions and their natural envi-
ronment, of civil social interactions and their relation to power as the potential to
use force, transcends the limits of first-order and second-order elementary under-
standing, such legitimation can only be given in systems of higher understanding,
“interpretations” of the lifeworld as a whole in myths, revealed religions, and
364 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

different systems of practical philosophy, including idealistic speculative systems

as well as different types of naturalism, e.g., Social Darwinism.
What has been said up until now was only a sketch of the generation of the
structures of the material categories of objects in the region that is of interest for
political science and its relation to the other social sciences. Presupposed are the
static and generative structures of a cultural lifeworld in general. The sketch is not
an epistemological analysis of the problems of a methodology of political science as
an empirical science, but it will be presupposed in the following phenomenological
epistemological reflections on the methods of political science. Reflections on real
conditions that are of significance for research in political science require reflections
on the relations between the region of political and economic interactions and the
legal regulations of social interactions. The next step preparing the epistemological
reflections on methods that can be applied in political science must, therefore,
provide a brief account of the foundations of the methods of political science and of
political history in the methods of economics and the science of the law, on the one
hand, and in the history of economics and the history of the law, on the other.
According to Sect. 10.4 the disciplines of the social sciences presuppose the
results of historical research determining “what was really the case” in the history
of the development of technological and economic structures, the history of the
law, and political history. Of interest is not historical research, its methods, and the
difficulties of the specific applications of these methods in contemporary history.
Of interest are only the reconstructed historical facts as the material basis for the
variations in imagination that are constitutive for the constitution of empirical and
ideal types of static and generative structures that can be relevant for the derivation
of predictions and explanations in political science.
Reconstructed historical facts are also of interest for epistemological reflections
on the differences between historical causal explanations121 borrowed from the
natural sciences, historical psychological explanations, and genuine historical causal
explanations. Of significance for political history is, for instance, if an action of a
politically relevant person can be understood as caused by the in-order-to-motive
of violating the system of the contemporary laws and customs with the intention of
introducing changes in this political system.
The causal connections underlying such explanations can be “understood,” and
causal connections that can be understood in this sense are genuine historical
explanations. To be “understood” means in the context of historical research to
be the outcome of philological-historical interpretations of available fixed life
expressions of a past foreign cultural lifeworld. Political history is interested in
explanations of past events. The history of the structures of the economy, the history
of the law, and political history presuppose each other in a system of structural
interdependencies in cultural lifeworlds with developed economic and legal systems
and systems of the distribution of power.

121
What has been said about historical causal explanations and real conditions in Chap. 6 is
presupposed for the following reflections.
10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law 365

Political science is interested in explanations of civil interactions in the imme-

diate past horizon of the present, but also in possible predictions of events in the
future horizon of the present. The real conditions that have to be analyzed in such
explanations and predictions can be found in the region of systems of positive laws,
in that of economic systems as foundations of the development of law systems,
and finally in the natural environment. The historical development of the economy
and economic structures is, therefore, a region that provides the real conditions
for the historical development and efficiency of systems of political power. For
political science, however, economic interactions are also vice versa the objects of
the application of the law in jurisprudence, and beyond that also of the political
interactions of law enforcement, lawgiving, ordinances, and other regulations.
Research in political science presupposes, therefore, research in economics and
the science of the law, and it includes these disciplines under the perspective of
the distribution of political power. Economic structures are relevant as foundations,
as real conditions for developments of the distribution of political power. Seen
from the viewpoint of political power structures, the task of the law is a system
of regulations of economic structures. Both together are of significance for the
resources and then the distribution of political power. Power is political power
(beyond its significance on the level of animalic understanding as a potential of
using violence against Others) only in this context, and it is of interest for political
science only in this sense. Some further remarks about this system of reciprocal
foundations are necessary before turning to the epistemological problems of the
methodology of political science as an empirical science interested in explanations
of past political developments and in predictions of future political developments.
It has been shown in the preceding sections that the empirical social sciences
have to use the methods of understanding, of methodologically guided interpre-
tations, but they also have to apply methods presupposing causal relations in
their explanations and predictions. The methods of economic research interested
in the civil interactions in a market economy presuppose interpretations of the
first-order understanding of practical social interactions in the encounter with a
natural environment. First-order understanding in practical interactions implies the
understanding of explanations and predictions that in developed market economies
are often borrowed from the explanations of the techniques and technologies, and
the prediction of the consequences of their application, that are pre-given by the
natural sciences.
As shown in Sect. 10.5 economic research is in addition able to apply mathemat-
ics in the analysis of the formal structures of social interactions and transactions of
products of market economies. Of central epistemological significance is, however,
how economic social interactions have to be understood; this understanding is first
of all the understanding of the purposes of market interactions and of how all these
purposes are species of the genus “maximizing the growth of wealth,” and this
is the presupposition both of the possibility of the application of mathematics in
economics and of the principle of selection of causal relations that can be used as
effective means for realizing this purpose.
366 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

The epistemological problems of jurisprudence are first of all problems of

the methodology of the interpretation and application of texts, i.e., hermeneutical
problems. Law texts refer to social interactions, their purposes, and the values
determining the purposes, but they imply predictions only as promises of possible
sanctions or other consequences that ought to follow well-defined cases of social
interaction. Predictions and explanations presupposing efficient causal relations are
of interest for jurisprudence only in the context of the task of determining “what was
really the case” before entering the problem of the interpretation and application of
the law. The logical structure and the methodological significance of predictions
in the basic structure of the ideal types of social interactions in economics and in
jurisprudence are, hence, toto genere different.
Economics presupposes interpretations, but it is first of all interested in expla-
nations and predictions. Jurisprudence is first of all interested in interpretations
of law texts, but it is interested explanations only in the reconstruction of what
was the case. Epistemological reflections on methods that can be applied in
political science presuppose the recognition of the doctrines of methods of both
of these disciplines and these doctrines have their roots, in different ways, in the
allegedly opposed methodologies of explanation and understanding. No satisfactory
account of a possible methodological approach in political science will be possible
for epistemologies that start with the assumption of a strict opposition between
explanation and understanding.
The central epistemological problem of the methods of empirical research in the
systematic social sciences is the problem of the methods of causal explanations of
political situations in the immediate past horizon and of predictions in the future
horizon of the actual present. What has been said about explanations in political
history can be used as a guideline for reflections on the problem of predictions in
political science. This means, however, that the specific methodological problems of
contemporary history already mentioned will be of significance for political science
as well.
The first task of a phenomenological epistemology of contemporary social
history and the empirical social sciences is the analysis of the ideal types (and their
general categorial structures) that can be found in the material of social interaction
for a social science. The ideal types of social interactions in the science of politics as
well as in the science of the law are ideal types of civil social interactions. The main
purpose guiding the civil interactions in a political community is the elimination of
conflict, the unregulated use of force between members or groups of members in
the community. The first step for the realization of this purpose is to determine the
sovereign, i.e., the person or group of persons who are entitled to give and to enforce
laws and ordinances.
Different “ideal types” of sovereignty, i.e., of constitutions, that determine
the legitimating principles for the power of lawgiving were already discussed
in Classical Antiquity. The Aristotelian list is not complete122 and is at least

122
The simplified version of the list is: monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny.
10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law 367

questionable; thus one task of political theory is to develop more comprehensive

and systematic systems of such ideal types of constitutions in the present stage of
the development of contemporary political history for the purposes of a political
science. There are, for instance, first of all different types of oligarchies, such as
the different types of the “dictatorship” of the Communist Party, of Fascism, of
modern Islamic or other theocracies. There are, furthermore, different types of
“republics” that are actually oligarchies of ethnic groups or clans that have occupied
the sovereignty of lawgiving.
The task of distinguishing between different ideal and empirical types of con-
stitutions and legitimate lawgiving in a political community must be distinguished
from the task of distinguishing the potential of different groups of people in the
political community to influence the sovereign in the process of lawgiving in the
political community. Set this aside the different types of people, e.g., males or
females, with different opportunities to gain access to political power in societies
that are determined by archaic family and clan structures,123 the membership in
such groups can be determined (1) by specific functions in the process of economic
interactions, e.g., today first of all farmers, workers, managers, shareholders,
bankers, and special professions like medical doctors. The membership can be
also determined (2) by functions in governmental institutions as public servants;
such as the police, the military, the administration of justice, and other government
agencies. Finally, the membership in such more or less well organized groups can
be determined (3) by the belief in one of the systems of higher understanding of the
social world and its natural environment mentioned above and by political parties
representing these or other types of ideologies. The ways in which such organiza-
tions (1–3) can participate in lawgiving can be institutionalized and determined by
laws. There is, however, also the possibility of the use of violence, i.e., of brute
power, to introduce changes in systems of institutions and laws, including more or
less radical changes in the structure of the distribution of power in a coup d’état, a
rebellion, or a revolution.
The first preparatory task of a phenomenological epistemology of empirical
research in the social sciences is the analysis of the process of intentional cog-
nitive activities in which the empirical and ideal types of systems of social
interactions, and of systems of such types, is originally given (Sects. 2.3 and
10.4). The next step is the critical analysis of the methods for the determining
of relevant factors and initial conditions in predictions and explanations that
are relevant for the empirical social sciences. Epistemological reflections on the
methods that can be applied to political science on this level have to begin
with the analysis of the relation between law and political power and go on
from there to a critical analysis of the foundations of this relation in deeper
layers of the whole context of political social interactions that are in the last
instance one-sidedly founded in economic structures. The power to use force

123
Such structures are, however, still of basic significance for the political development in many of
the so-called “developing countries” of the twenty-first century.
368 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

and the distribution of this power are the basic categories of the region of
political civil social interactions, i.e., the region of relevant observations of political
science.
Laws have the abstract logical structure of generalized conditionals, but these
conditionals do not refer to efficient or formal or final causes. In the case of laws
as normative conditionals, the generalized conditionals have the specific material
structure of generalized promises determining that all events or state of affairs of
the type x mentioned in the antecedents ought to be followed by an event or state
of affairs y in the consequent. This is the “empirical” dimension of jurisprudence
considered in the preceding section. The methodological problems of jurisprudence
are problems of a methodology of interpretation and application. A law, however,
is a law according to the basic pragmatic principle of the science of the law only
if it can be enforced, if it is possible to realize what is promised in the law.
This principle of the science of the law determines the first dimension that is
of immediate significance for political science as an empirical science because it
adds the dimension of efficient causal relations, and this also means that it adds a
dimension of possible empirical research.
The normative conditional “if there is an event of the type x, this x always ought
to be followed by the event y” has the character of a viable promise if and only
if there is a person or a group of persons who are able to realize y, to cause that
events of the type x will indeed be followed by events y. The law is, therefore, of
significance for predictions of the future course of events in civil social interactions
only if the law can be enforced because to use force is to enact a causal relation,
and with it, the logical possibility of predictions and explanations.
The second relation between law and political power is lawgiving. Developed
law systems can have, beyond the penal and the civil law, systems of constitutional
laws or state laws that determine the difference between legitimate and illegitimate
procedures of lawgiving. Legitimate lawgiving is, however, meaningless without
the power to enforce it. This formal principle together with the formal principle that
the purpose the lawgiving is first of all to avoid violent conflicts among citizens or
groups of citizens, implies a third formal principle. This principle requires that only
the sovereign, i.e., the institution that has the legitimation to give laws, is also the
institution in the state that has the legitimation to use power and ought to have this
power for violent enforcements of laws and regulations.
Seen from the viewpoint of the science of the law, the power to give laws and to
enforce given laws is the main problem for political science. The question is whether
it is in all of its dimensions a problem for political sciences as an empirical science.
The purpose of the ideal type “political social interaction” in general is, hence, seen
from this viewpoint legitimate lawgiving. Apart from the formal presuppositions of
legitimate lawgiving, the highest material purpose of legitimate lawgiving is to give
just laws; just laws are laws given for the commonweal and not for private interests.
Empirical research in the systematic human sciences in general and, hence,
in economics and political science as well is in the last instance interested in
predictions and the discovery of “laws” of social life, i.e., generalized conditionals
that can count as weak analogues of “laws of nature.” They can only be weak
10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law 369

analogues because of the high degree of complexity of the social context and
the restricted temporal framework in the development of societies in which such
generalized conditionals can be relevant for predictions.124
What has to be kept is mind is that the rationality of ideal types of social
interactions presupposes that the selection of means to realize the purposes is
first of all interested in means that admit explications with the aid of efficient
causal relations. The means are rational means only if they are causes that have
useful effects for the realization of the purpose. The first step of empirical research
interested in causal relations is the collection of all available empirical data that are
necessary to determine the factors that are necessary for precise descriptions of the
causal conditions and their conditioned effects. Different types of such data can be
distinguished in different disciplines.
The social sciences in general have to cope with problems of determining
external factors that are relevant for simple cause-effect relations; problems that
arise because of the complexity of the ideal types of systems of interdependencies
in social interactions. Political science has additional difficulties because it is
confronted from the outset with the interdependency between the structures of
practical and civil interactions of the economy on the one hand and the structures
of the distribution of power behind lawgiving and the enforcement of the law on the
other. There are, secondly, internal factors, first of all the reactions of participants
in systems of social interactions to changes in the systems.
The region of external factors is, on the one hand, the region of pre-given present
systems of laws and law enforcement and the recognized legitimate procedures
of political acts of lawgiving. On the other hand, there is the region of practical
economic interactions as the foundation for the production of the technological
and financial resources of political power as a power to enforce the law within
the political community, along with the military power used in conflicts with other
political communities. Economic interactions are furthermore of significance as a
system of real conditions both for the process of lawgiving and for the structure
of law systems that determine lawgiving because more or less organized groups
guided by different economic interests also have the power resources to influence
the process of lawgiving in favor of their interests.
Systems of practical economic interactions also determine systems of higher
understanding of the social and natural environment of a social lifeworld as
a whole in myths and different types of religion, as well as of pre-scientific
philosophical and scientific worldviews. Such systems of higher understanding have
always determined the background of disputes about “just” laws and, hence, of
the rationality of the choices of purposes in the process of lawgiving as a political
activity. They can have a significant and sometimes violent impact on the political
process of lawgiving and enforcing the law.125

124
Cf. Sect. 10.2.
125
The fight for or against laws permitting/prohibiting marriages of homosexuals is in the last
instance a fight between worldviews: namely, between the system of higher understanding of the
370 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

The existence and further development of economic systems presuppose, vice

versa, the coexistence and development of legal systems regulating first of all
property systems, i.e., the distribution of wealth, and such legal systems must be
enforced.126 The possibility of the enforcement of the legal system presupposes that
the system itself warrants that only the state has the legitimation to use power against
all powers inside and outside the social community that threaten to violate the
legal system. In a functioning economic system that produces revenue via taxation
and other forms of “expropriation,” such systems have in addition the necessary
resources for the support of the enforcement of the legal system.
The immediate consequence is that the external factors that are able to introduce
changes in the economic system also have the potential to cause changes in the
political system. It is, therefore, difficult in political science to isolate cause-effect
relations that admit predictions from a cause given in the present to an effect that will
be given in the future. The presupposed cause-effect relations represent only one
aspect of reciprocal causal relations between the power behind the enforcement of
a legal system as a factor that causes changes in the economy, on the one hand, and
on the other hand, changes in the economy that cause changes in the legal system
and the distribution of power behind the lawgiving and the enforcement of the legal
system.
Problems connected with interfering internal factors in economics and also in
political science, and attempts to derive causal interdependencies between such
factors and predictions of future events and developments, are problems for research
in social psychology. Presupposed in such attempts are first of all statistical
evaluations of the results of diagnostic questioning and of interviewing members of
certain groups in the political community about their attitudes and their judgments
about their social situations or about changes in these situations. Of interest are also
more or less hidden psychic inclinations and drives that have an impact on in-order-
to-motives of members of certain groups.
The main epistemological problem in such investigations is in general the objec-
tive validity of presupposed interpretations of systems of social interactions that
determine the social environment of the “objects” of the diagnostic questioning.127
The “objects” in diagnostic questioning are subjects, other persons who are able to
respond to interpretations of the political situation implied in the questioning and to
react to the results of the investigation.

right of individuals of the Enlightenment and the system of higher understanding of the theocratic
laws of the Old Testament that still dominate ethical and political doctrines in Muslim and Christian
traditions.
126
Economic liberalism defends the freedom of the market against legal regulation of the state but
has no sympathy for other types of freedom, e.g., the freedom of the enemies of merchants and
bankers, namely, robber barons, bank robbers, and communists. The state is required to suppress
such freedoms with the force of the law.
127
Cf. Sects. 10.4 and 10.6.
10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law 371

Closely connected with this problem are two other problems. It is of specific
significance for political science as an empirical social science that no purposes,
final causes that are able to determine rational selections of effective means are pre-
given. Economics is able to presuppose such ideal types; however, political science
(and especially political science as a science of rational lawgiving) is not able to
restrict itself to rationality in the selection of means. What is of interest are first of all
criteria not for rational choices of means, but for reasonable choices of purposes of
social interactions and actions. It is impossible to bracket the problem of the higher-
order “rationality” of the selection of purposes in political science because it cannot
be bracketed in political theories of lawgiving. It is, hence, questionable whether the
analysis of the contents and the structure of systems of purposes and the experience
of values that are constitutive for in-order-to-motives behind the choice of certain
purposes and their realization can be solved with the methods of an empirical social
science.
There is, secondly, the problem that political science presupposes economics
and the science of the law as its foundations. Results of these two sciences are
presupposed in different degrees in all other sociologies of : : : , but political science
includes from the outset the structure of the system of politically relevant social
interactions as a whole, i.e., it is of interest in different perspectives, for all groups
and members of the political community and for the purposes of their interactions.
The question is, hence, whether and how it is possible to find criteria for the
determination of the distance between researchers and the objects of research that is
the presupposition of the possibility of “disinterested” observation.
The two problems just mentioned will be considered at the end of this section
after an analysis of the scope and the limits of the empirical basis for testing
predictions in the region of empirical research in political science. Political theory
can be recognized as empirical social science only if it is able to fulfill the
methodological requirements for empirical science. The first basic requirement is
that political science must be able to discover generalized conditionals referring to
causal connections that can be applied in explanations and predictions of events that
change or save the structures of politically relevant social interactions.
The second basic requirement is that the predictions must be testable, and the
touchstone of the tests must be empirical material that can be given for intersensory
observations. Social sciences are sciences of interpretation, i.e., of methodologically
guided secondary understanding of the first-order understanding that is implied in
fixed and immediate life expressions. The empirical material that can be used for
confirmations or disconfirmations of predictions in political science can only be
interpreted life expressions, and thus these interpreted life expressions must be
accessible for intersensory observations.
The empirical basis of research in political science is, hence, coextensive with
the empirical basis of research in contemporary history. Of interest for descriptions
of the initial circumstances are immediate life expressions, fixations of immediate
life expressions, and fixed life expressions. The methods in political science on
this descriptive level are the methods of historical research, i.e., the reconstruction
of what was/is really the case with the aid of interpreted life expressions. Such
372 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

interpretations presuppose a methodology of interpretations, a methodologically

guided hermeneutics. It is essential for the analysis of the methods of political
science as an empirical science and of contemporary history to keep in mind
both that the methodological abstraction of the philological-historical method is
not applicable in contemporary history (Sects. 5.4, 5.5, 10.2 and 10.4) and that
the applicable methods are the precisely the methods that can be applied in the
investigations of “what was really the case” in jurisprudence (Sect. 10.6).
The observables of descriptions for social interactions in the present and its
temporal horizons are life expressions. The predictions and explanations implied
in observed social interactions already imply the secondary understanding of
the purposes (and with them, of the in-order-to-motives of participants in social
interactions). The general patterns pre-given for the search of explanations and
predictions in the social sciences are the ideal types of practical social interactions
and civil social interactions in general.
The region of practical economic interactions is, according to the above-
mentioned and generally accepted thesis, the region of the real conditions for
the region of civil social interactions. According to Sect. 10.5 and the preceding
sections, ideal types of systems of economic practical interactions require in-order-
to-motives implied in purposes that are interested in raw materials and techniques as
means for the realization of the purpose, i.e., the production of marketable goods that
can be explained in terms of efficient causality. Moreover, the choice of in-order-to
motives is restricted on the level of a developed market economy to the purpose
of the increase of wealth, vulgo maximizing profits. In this sense the discovery of
efficient means admits in this case the application of mathematical calculations.
Economics can, hence, be recognized as an empirical social science within the
limits that have been mentioned in Sect. 10.5. The principle “increase of wealth”
understood as “maximizing profits” is presupposed as the rationale or reasonable
choice of the highest purpose for economic interactions.
The causal factors determining the structure (and the changes in the structure)
of civil political interactions will in the most cases be changes in the structure of
economic practical interactions and of other economic civil interactions that are
immediately connected with practical interactions. The immediate real condition
of the effects of political civil interactions is the force behind the commands and
rules of a political authority that is required for the realization of the purposes of
the rules or commands given by the political authority. A political authority is,
therefore, interested in resources for the increase of its power. Of significance in this
respect is the degree to which technological means are available for the production
of sophisticated weapons, the “tools” for the use of force, but also the availability of
technologies that can be applied for other purposes, e.g., for purposes of effective
communication systems. Of central significance is that the possibility of raising
taxes on the production of goods and on the profits gained in trading goods is a
means of increasing the financial resources that can be used to develop and to apply
such types of technologies in order to increase power as the ability to use force in
social interactions.
10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law 373

Power is of significance as political power, beyond the ability to use brute bodily
force, as a power to enforce rules and commands, first in archaic non-literate soci-
eties and then in literate cultural traditions that relate to the giving and enforcing of
laws regulating civil and practical interactions. Of interest for a phenomenological
epistemology of political science is, hence, not merely the question of the efficiency
of economic conditions for the increase of the resources of political power. The
epistemological reflection on methods used for description of relevant factors and
their effects in the region of political interactions has to cope with the additional
problems not only of conditions determined by economic structures for lawgiving
and enforcing the law that are of interest for political science but also (and vice
versa) of conditions determined by lawgiving and law enforcement for economic
structures. The methods applied in economics are similar to the methods of the
confirmation or disconfirmation of hypotheses referring to cause-effect relations in
the natural sciences. But the methods applied in jurisprudence and in the science of
the law are first of all methods of the human sciences, more precisely, of the sciences
of interpretation.
The first task of the analysis of the region of the political interactions of lawgiving
and law enforcement is the interpretation of texts representing the presently pre-
given law system and its background in the history of the law. The problem of
the application of the law, the main problem of jurisprudence, is not a problem
for political science as a theoretical empirical science. Left are the problems of the
philological-historical interpretation of law texts. The interpretation of laws implies,
according to the analyses of Sect. 10.6, the interpretation of the context of a law
in the system of positive laws. It presupposes, secondly, the interpretation of the
presently still relevant historical background of the development of the law system
and, finally, of the texts that are relevant for the systems of higher understanding
that provide the legitimating for the lawgiving and law enforcement of the pre-given
law system.
It is, hence, a special difficulty for research interested in causal conditions that
can be used in predictions and explanations in political science that the methods
used in descriptions of factors in the causal conditions on the one hand and
factors in the effects of these conditions on the other are different. The causal
conditions belong to the region of economic interactions and their descriptions
imply descriptions of causal relations applied in the techniques and technologies
of economic interactions, causal relations that on the level of the market economy
admit even mathematical explications. In contrast, the principles of the methods
of the description of the conditioned effects are the principles of the method-
ology of philological-historical interpretations. Interpretations of life expressions
in the empirical basis of economics refer in the last instance to immediate life
expressions connected with practical and civil economic interactions that can be
given in secondary understanding in the present. But the interpretations of laws
in jurisprudence are interpretations of fixed life expressions and have to apply the
methods of philological text interpretations. Furthermore, according to Sect. 10.6
law systems include not only (1) laws for social interactions on the level of animalic,
374 10 History and the Systematic Human Sciences

practical, and civil social interactions, but also (2) systems of constitutional or state
law regulating not only the enforcement of the law, but first of all the distribution of
political power, i.e., the access to the process of lawgiving. On this level they also
indirectly determine possible ways to gain political power by violating pre-given
laws of the existing law system of level (2).128
The levels (1) and (2) together presuppose (3) the contemplative systems of
higher understanding mentioned above that are able to provide the legitimation of
political authorities to give and to enforce laws. As contemplative systems such
systems transcend the regions of economic systems and systems of positive law, but
they do imply and refer to such systems, last but not least as, e.g., theological and/or
philosophical theories of the law and the state.
The systems of the legitimation of political power (3) of higher understanding
mirror the system of the interests of groups and institutions in a society as a whole,
and this system is ultimately also the region of real conditions for the contemplative
systems of higher understanding that are constitutive for the legitimation of the
lawgiving sovereign. Such systems can also be powerful factors for the realization
of the interest of partial groups and institutions in the region of economic social
interactions who use their influence to introduce changes in the system of lawgiving
and the law. The in-order-to-motives of such “conservative” resistance are in
most cases determined by the value systems of religious traditions, but also of
other types of worldviews. Difficulties connected with (3) are, hence, immediately
consequences of the above-mentioned problems that indicate the limits of possible
applications of the methods of the empirical social sciences in political science.
Set aside that the degree of complexity and the speed of historical changes of
factors that are relevant for predictions and explanations in the social sciences
is much higher than in the life sciences the essential difference between both
types of sciences is in the social sciences that empirical descriptions of such
factors presuppose the interpretation of life expressions of contemporaries in the
region of contemporary history. According to Sect. 10.4 the first epistemological
problem for social sciences in general was, therefore, that the presupposition of the
possibility of testing hypothetical interpretations in history, the strict separation of
interpretation and application, is not applicable in contemporary history. The second
epistemological problem was that hypothetical predictions about the behavior of
the objects of the social sciences are themselves already able to function as factors
determining the behavior of the objects. They are potential factors because they are
not only objects, but at the same time subjects, contemporaries who can react to the
publication of the results, and especially to the predictions of investigations of the
social sciences.
The method used to overcome these difficulties in the social sciences is the
construction of ideal types. Rational ideal types are in particular able to propose
explanations and testable predictions presupposing effective causal relations in
practical and even civil social interactions and to determine external and internal

128
Cf. Sect. 6.2 esp. the example of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon.
10.7 From Political Science to the Science of Law 375

factors that are able to explain disconfirmations of such predictions. Except for the
applicability of the results of the natural sciences in the discovery of technological
means in practical social interactions, economics is the social science that admits
predictions with the highest degree of effective and even mathematically calculable
causal relations (Sect. 10.5).
The region of objects of political science is a special case of this highest degree
of complexity in the social sciences. It presupposes economics as the science of the
practical and social interactions that provide the resources for power and for the
division of power in political systems. It also includes, however, the ideal types of
civil social interactions in the regions of the administration of the application of
the law, of the enforcement of the law, and finally of lawgiving. The study of laws,
law systems, and systems of law regulating the process of lawgiving presupposes
the interpretation of law texts and the methodology of text interpretations in gen-
eral. The methodology of philological-historical interpretations and reconstructions
implies a methodological abstraction that requires the separation of interpretation
and application. The possibility of separating interpretation and application already
vanishes in contemporary history because in contemporary history the contextual
horizons of the text and of the interpreter are not separable.
Both lawgiving and enforcing the given laws are political civil interactions that
happen in the present including the immediate past, but also in the future horizon
of the present and are of basic significance for political science as a social science.
There are questions of giving laws that are only of immediate interest for partial
groups and institutions. It is, of course, also possible in such cases to ask whether
such laws are just or unjust laws, but in such cases it is still possible for political
scientists who are only interested in value free judgments to consider the political
process of lawgiving from the outside as disinterested observers.
The situation is different if the laws are of vital interest for the whole of the
present life of a social community, i.e., for all members of the community and
all social relations between the members in social interactions. No member of the
society can be disinterested in such laws and the giving of such laws not only
because of distinctions that belong to the realm of the “ought to be – ought not
to be,” but also because of their interest in the material conditions of their existence.
The epistemological consequences for the question whether political theory can be
reduced to political science as an empirical social science will be considered in the
summary at the end of Part V.
 Part V
Summary and Conclusions
Chapter 11
Summary and Conclusions

The following concluding remarks begin in Sect. 11.1 with a survey of the
partially paradoxical controversies in discussions about the system of the empirical
sciences in the last century and their foundations in the paradox of subjectivity.
Section 11.2 is a summary of what has been said in the preceding investigations
about the foundations of the empirical sciences in the structures of the lifeworld.
Section 11.3 offers a summary of conclusions that are relevant for attempts to
develop a system of empirical sciences and can be derived from phenomenologically
guided reflections on the methods and methodologies of the empirical sciences,
together with concluding remarks about the epistemic status of a phenomenological
epistemology.

11.1 Naturalism, Historicism, Historism and the Paradox

of Subjectivity

A summary of the positive results of the preceding investigations presupposes a

critical review of the epistemological reflections on the system of the sciences and
their development in the last century. This development started with Dilthey and
Rickert (Sects. 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4). It ended with the contradictory theses of the priority
of the cultural or spiritual world as correlate of the human sciences over the natural
world as correlate of the natural sciences, or vice versa, in the tradition of analytic
philosophy, the priority of the natural sciences and the natural world over the human
sciences.
The main task of the summary of the results of the preceding investigation
in this and the next sections to show how the paradoxical consequences of this
controversy can be avoided with the aid of the distinction between the epistemic
and the ontic interpretation of the controversy; a critical phenomenological analysis

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 379

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8_11
380 11 Summary and Conclusions

of the meaning of understanding and explanation; and a critical interpretation of the

distinction between “methodological abstraction” and “abstractive reduction.”
The final task of the present section is to unearth the foundations of the dilemma
just mentioned in the paradox of subjectivity as the partial structure of reflective
awareness in the lifeworld (Sect. 2.4).
According to the thesis of the priority of the natural sciences, it is possible to
“explain” all phenomena or observables that are relevant for the human sciences in
terms of categories of the natural sciences. The thesis of the priority of the human
or “spiritual” sciences emphasizes, on the contrary, that the theories of the natural
sciences are, as historical facts, historical phenomena that must be understood in
their own historical context. The reconstruction of the historical past is able not only
to reveal the fallibility of all scientific discoveries, but also to discover “revolutions,”
i.e., basic methodological paradigm shifts in the history of the natural sciences.
What these revolutions really mean can only be understood in the context of the
past historical period from which they emerged (Sects. 7.1 and 7.2).
One of the epistemic presuppositions of naturalism or naturalistic physicalism
is the possibility of assuming that the second methodological abstraction that
determines the region of objects of physics is in addition also an abstractive
reduction. The immediate consequence is that the theories of the soft natural
sciences (i.e., the life sciences) that have their region of objects in the residuum
of the first methodological abstraction can be reduced to, i.e., explicated with the
aid of the theories about, the objects in the region of the hard sciences (Sects. 7.2
and 8.5).
Epistemic naturalism adds the epistemic thesis that psychology can be reduced
to the life sciences and then finally (together with the life sciences) to physics.
Naturalism in the radical sense adds the ontological thesis that all the phenomena
that belong to the region of the historical and the social human sciences can be
reduced to psychology, and again with psychology to physics. It is prima facie
plausible to assume such a possible methodological reduction for experimental
research in psychology; and similar methods can be used in the social sciences.
It is plausible because as sciences of presently given phenomena, both are able
to use immediate intersensory observations of facts and quasi-experimental and
experimental methods. The problem is, however, that the description of psycholog-
ical facts also presupposes (Sect. 10.3), even in case of experimental psychology,
also elements of secondary understanding referring, e.g., to in-order-to-motives and
purposes of actions and social interactions.
The epistemic claim that research in the human sciences in general (and
especially in the historical human sciences) can be reduced to psychological
research and then to research in the natural sciences is absurd. It has been shown
(Sect. 6.4) that historical research by itself can “falsify” psychological causal
explanations of historical facts by simply using the methods of interpreting fixed
life expressions and reconstructing a past reality, the assumption that the explained
assumed historical fact was really the case. It is impossible in general to replace the
methodology of philological-historical research with the methodology of research
in the natural sciences. To claim, e.g., that brain physiology can help to translate
11.1 Naturalism, Historicism, Historism and the Paradox of Subjectivity 381

the Iliad or to reconstruct the relevant historical facts of the trial of Galileo without
the aid of interpretations of the Latin documents in the archives of the Vatican is
absurd. This does not imply that it is meaningless to try to find first psychological
explanation and then perhaps the underlying physiological structures that support a
psychological explanations for historical facts. But historical facts as such can be
reconstructed and interpreted as historical facts only with the methods of historical
research (Sects. 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4 and 9.1).
The modern ontic understanding of naturalism has its foundation in the modern
epistemic understanding of naturalism. A phenomenological epistemology is able to
offer solutions for the difficulties of the epistemic understanding and to recognize
this naturalism as a respectable research program. An ontic understanding, however,
will end in paradoxes, and these paradoxes have their foundations in the paradox
of subjectivity that has been considered in Sect. 2.4. The first indicators for this
transition from the epistemic to the ontic understanding are ambiguities in the
meaning of “explanation.”
It is essential for causal explanations in the natural sciences, e.g., in classical
physics, that not only all factors belonging to the set of initial conditioning factors,
but also the set of factors belonging to the state of affairs in the effect must admit
explications and descriptions in terms of the basic categories: mass, force, energy,
movement, etc., of classical physics. To reduce, e.g., the life sciences to physics
according to an ontic understanding of naturalism means that all the basic categories
of the life sciences can be represented in explications that use only the categories
of physics. The consequence in the context of classical physics was that living
organisms had to be understood as mechanical clockworks.
“Explanation” in terms of the methodology of the natural sciences can only mean
that theoretical entities of physics are the efficient causes of all objects given in
the lifeworld, including the objects given in my own inner experience and the lived
experience of Others given in the understanding of the life expressions of Others.
The explananda are in this case the objects in the lifeworld. The explanans is nature
as the world of objects that are ultimately explicable in terms of the categories
of physics. But this type of a causal connection cannot have the logical structure
of causal connections in the world of the objects of the natural sciences. Instead,
the causal relation is an analogue of an ontic relation between the thing in itself,
representing the real reality that “causes” appearances given in the lived experience
of conscious life and these experiential appearances themselves. Here cause and
effect belong to strictly distinct regions in the lifeworld that are determined by
different systems of categories.
The difficulties of a satisfying epistemological explication of the ontological
meaning of “explaining” increase with the transition from classical to post-classical
physics. The theoretical entities of classical physics are “written in mathematical
letters,” but these letters still refer to exact essences that presuppose variations
in imagination admitting quasi-pictorial representations (Sect. 8.3). The additional
difficulty for naturalism in the context of post-classical physics is that the theoretical
entities of modern physics, i.e., of relativity theory and quantum theory, can only
be represented in the language of post-classical mathematics and in this sense
382 11 Summary and Conclusions

are, therefore, mathema-physical entities that do not admit even quasi-pictorial

representations (Sect. 8.4). They are this respect similar to Kantian things in
themselves that cause the appearances in which the objects of our experience are
given, now including even the objects of classical physics that admit pictorial
representations. The Kantian things in themselves are objects of pure understanding.
The theoretical objects of modern physics are objects of first-order understanding in
terms of the language of the formalism of the mathesis universalis, and this means
that they are objects of a meta-physics. What “cause,” “matter,” “force,” “energy,”
etc., means can only be determined in terms of the mathesis universalis.
There are other puzzles and difficulties of ontological naturalism in the context
of the lifeworld, e.g., for naturalistic explications of terms like “responsibility” or
“freedom,” that are not of immediate epistemological interest and can be neglected
for the purposes of this investigation. Of central significance for epistemology is,
however, an epistemic paradox that lurks behind the final reduction of all contents
of lived experience in the lifeworld to the theoretical objects of physics.
The justification of the naturalistic reductions is, according to the most recent
argument, that brain physiology is able to find explanations that reduce all contents
of conscious life, and consciousness itself, to physiological processes in the brain.
The first premise of this argument for naturalism is that all successful localizations
of physiological processes that occur as correlates of the givenness of certain
contents in conscious life can serve as causal explanations of the appearance of the
contents. The argument is, however, invalid without a second premise asserting that
the brain as a whole is not only able to “cause” changes in the subconscious and
conscious contents of consciousness, but also that the whole of the physiological
processes in the brain is also able to create conscious lived experience in all of its
aspects. It is, hence, also the brain itself that distinguishes between itself as BRAIN
and its objects, including the brain as an object of the brain physiologist. The
BRAIN is the origin of the conscious distinction between subject and object. But
this presupposes that the BRAIN, especially the BRAIN of the brain physiologists,
posits itself qua physiological entity as a subject that can have as its object the
brain as a physiological entity given in the context of other physiological and
physical entities.1 Entering ontological metaphysical speculations, it is possible
to understand the positing BRAIN as a naturalistic analogue of the Fichtean
ABSOLUTE EGO that posits itself as ego and the non-ego.
It is, however, also possible to understand this situation of naturalistic self-
reflection as an instance of the paradox of subjectivity. Consciousness is given to
itself as the correlate of the givenness of the world, and moreover as a correlate that
accompanies the givenness of all objects given in the world, but the answer to the
question concerning what consciousness is necessarily implies that it exists in the
world. More about this reduction of the paradox of the BRAIN can be said below
after considering the paradoxical problems of historicism.

1
The explication given for the paradox of the BRAIN follows Emrich 1990, ch. IV.
11.1 Naturalism, Historicism, Historism and the Paradox of Subjectivity 383

Critical reflections on historicism in the context of a phenomenological epis-

temology have to start with Husserl’s comments on historicism. Husserl rejected
historicism in his “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” of 1910/1911 because it
implies historical relativism, relativism implies skepticism, and skepticism refutes
itself. Historicism had to be refuted together with naturalistic psychologism because
it denies the objective validity of ideal objects, first of all the objective validity of
formal logic, along with formal ontology, including the mathesis universalis.
Seen from a systematic point of view, it is of significance for a possible extension
of Husserl’s critique of historicism that natural science is, seen from the viewpoint
of historicism, a specific cogitative type of understanding that has the region of
objects in the natural world as its correlate. As such it has a history, and this history
is the object of research in the history of natural science. Historicism in the context
of the epistemology of the formal and empirical sciences entered the scene in the
second half of the twentieth century with the theses that epistemological reflections
ought to consider not what scientists ought to do, but what they actually do or
have done in the course of the history of science; historical research in the history
of science then reveals that scientific methods and theories in past periods of the
development of the natural sciences have been guided by paradigms.2
According to the radical version of this historicism, paradigm shifts in the history
of science cannot be understood as indicators of progress in scientific rationality.
They emerge like shifts in the paradigms of styles in art history. The authors of the
thesis that it is possible to derive the principles of the epistemology of the empirical
and then even of the formal sciences from the results of research in the history
of sciences tried to deny that the consequence of their historicism is relativism.
Such a denial is, however, impossible without introducing serious corrections of the
thesis that the history of science is the touchstone for epistemological investigations.
According to Husserl’s analysis relativism implies skepticism and the self-refutation
of skepticism. Self-refutation means in this case the self-refutation of the thesis
that the history of science is able to provide principles that can be applied in
the epistemological justification of the claim of the natural sciences to be able to
reach the level of theories that can be recognized as representing objectively valid
knowledge.
It is, furthermore, of significance for the problem of historicism in episte-
mological reflections on the natural sciences that historicism ultimately implies
the self-refutation of the claim of historical research to deliver objectively valid
reconstructions of past historical events in general, and especially in the history
of science itself. It is not difficult to find different paradigms of interpretation and
different ways in which “history” and “literary tradition” were understood in the
historical literature of Classical Antiquity, of the Middle Ages, of the humanists

2
Cf. Sect. 7.1 on relativism in Thomas Kuhn’s conception of the history of science. It has been
mentioned in Sects. 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 that the transition from classical to post-classical physics,
relativity theory, and quantum theory is not of basic significance in Husserl’s later writings, but it
was of crucial significance for the historicism of Kuhn and others in the history of science.
384 11 Summary and Conclusions

in the Renaissance, of the philological-historical sciences in the nineteenth century,

etc. It is, hence, obvious that historical research too is guided by changing paradigms
that also emerge as results of paradigm shifts. But if the claim of possible objective
validity in historical research must be denied, then it is meaningless to offer an
epistemology of the natural sciences that presupposes results of research in the
history of the sciences.
The dominant problem in the early manuscripts of Ideas II after Husserl’s
correspondence with Dilthey was the problem not of historicism, but of historism.
The term “historism” was not used by Husserl. It has been introduced in this
investigation to distinguish between the epistemic and the ontic meaning of the
set of problems that emerged in attempts to solve such problems with the support
of historical research. A terminological distinction introduced by Popper3 for
partially different purposes has been used in this investigation for denoting the
phenomenological distinction between the problems of historicism and the problems
of historism. The problems of historism emerged in the dispute about the priority
of the natural world of the natural sciences over the spiritual world of the human
sciences or vice versa the priority of the spiritual world over the natural world in
Ideas II.4 The problems connected with this dilemma are the ontological problems
connected with the ontic opposition of naturalism and historism. Dilthey’s and
Husserl’s preference in this dilemma was historism.
It is, finally, necessary to mention a radicalized type of ontic historism, the
historicity of Being, and its epistemological consequences because certain con-
sequences of this position have been of significance for the discussion of the
epistemological problems of philology and history as empirical sciences in the pre-
ceding investigations (Sects. 4.4, 5.4 and 6.5). According to Heidegger fundamental
ontology requires the attitude of a contemplation of Being above and beyond
the deficient modes of the experience of Being in the sciences and ontologies
that presuppose the objective validity of the methodology of scientific research.
Being and its Truth appear as a hermeneutics of Being in the horizons of the
historicity of linguisticality. It is possible to establish hermeneuticism as a rad-
icalized historism above and beyond any interest in the possibility of objective
validity in philological and historical research and its methodological foundations
in a possible separation of interpretation and application in philological-historical
research. A phenomenological epistemology is able to respect the thesis that this
fundamental ontological interpretation of hermeneutics is disinterested in questions

3
Husserl used the term Historizismus in “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” (Hua XXV, 3–62),
but he never explicitely distinguished between Historizismus and Historismus. Popper used both
terms in Popper 1957, but his “historism” is an analogue of Husserl’s “historicism” and what he
called “historicism” are theories about metaphysical theories of history as a whole like Hegelianism
or Marxism.
4
Cf. Seebohm 2013. It may be noted that, though it might sound awkward in English, the
terminological equation “world of the human sciences” D “historical world” D “spiritual world,”
is natural for the German terminology: “Welt der Geisteswissenschaften” D “geistige Welt” due to
Hegel’s objective spirit.
11.1 Naturalism, Historicism, Historism and the Paradox of Subjectivity 385

of method and methodology and is therefore epistemologically irrelevant. However,

a phenomenological epistemology is not able to tolerate attempts to use this analysis
of the pre-scientific deep structures of understanding as an argument against the
methodological significance of the separation of application and interpretation in
philological research. Such attempts necessarily end in a regression back to the pre-
scientific unity of interpretation and application in archaic literary traditions.
The preceding analyses indicated that the foundation of epistemological reflec-
tions that determine the formal structure of the paradoxes of naturalism and
historicism is the paradox of subjectivity. According to Husserl’s formula for the
paradox of subjectivity (Sect. 2.4) consciousness is given for itself as being the
subject of the sum total of all objects in the world in the reflective transcendental
attitude, but it is also given to itself as being an object in the world in the natural
attitude. The paradox of subjectivity appears for the ontic interpretation of its aspects
in modern philosophy in disguise as unbridgeable as the antithetic opposition of
philosophical materialism and idealism and in the discussion of epistemological
problems as the opposition naturalism and historism. Husserl himself preferred in
the Crisis a metaphysical interpretation of the phenomenological answer to the
question of ultimate grounding and with it an ontic interpretation of the paradox.
Prima facie these preferences cause problems for the necessary preference of the
epistemic interpretation of the paradox in a phenomenological epistemology.
Dilthey’s empirical morphological typology based on inner experience and the
inner re-living of foreign mental life is not able to provide a precise analysis
of interpersonal spiritual life; a recognition of the specific objectivity of the
manifestations of spiritual life; a solution for the problems of historism; or a
justification of the decision in favor for the thesis of the priority of the historical-
spiritual over the natural world. Only transcendental phenomenology as the absolute
science of the spirit, the absolute Geisteswissenschaft, together with the application
of the method of eidetic intuition, is able to justify this decision.5
The need to offer a solution for the problems that surfaced with the recogni-
tion of Dilthey’s ideal universal human science as a path to the transcendental-
phenomenological reduction was one of the motives for the new metaphysical
understanding of transcendental phenomenology in Husserl’s last writings, first of
all in the Crisis.6 The problems of the antithetical opposition of the spiritual and
the natural world and the need for a justification of the decision for the priority
of the spiritual world over the natural world (and with it for the first horn of the
dilemma of the paradox of subjectivity) required a new solution for the problem of
Letztbegründung, ultimate grounding.

5
Cf. Hua IX, §2 and Beilage II (1928).
6
See Hua VI, §§54, 55, and 73. It is essential to keep in mind that the paradox of subjectivity
appears in §§54 and 55 as the presupposition of Husserl’s “discovery” of the primal ego, cf.
the preliminary considerations in §4. A list of other manuscripts that are of significance for the
interpretation of the primal ego as ultimate foundation of phenomenological research is now
available in Geniusas 2012, ch. 9.
386 11 Summary and Conclusions

For the first steps of the analyses of transcendental phenomenology, the tran-
scendental ego is given as a pole in the sequence of active intentional activities.
This transcendental ego is, however, only the individual and therefore mundane ego
of the phenomenologist. Phenomenological analyses and reflections on this level
are, therefore, plagued by the problems of solipsism and the paradox of subjectivity.
However, in the Analyses of Passive Synthesis,7 the transcendental ego as an abstract
pole in active syntheses is only an indicator of the transcendental ego understood as
the self-manifesting activity of the Ur-Ich, the “primal” ego.8 Passive synthesis as
associative synthesis is determined by structures in the hyletic field as a necessary
foundation of active synthesis and of the ego as pole of active syntheses. The primal
ego can be understood as the “medium” in and “first mover” of the genesis of
the unity and the process of subjective and intersubjective conscious life that is
pre-given for the method of reflective analyses of transcendental-phenomenology
after the first “naïve” transcendental phenomenological reduction. The analyses of
passive synthesis are also presupposed in the analyses of the givenness of Others,
i.e., the constitution of transcendental intersubjectivity and with it the cultural or
spiritual world.9
Only the primal ego (and not the ego as the abstract pole of a manifold of
cogitations) is, hence, able to satisfy the requirements of a justification for the thesis
of the ontological priority of the spiritual world over the natural world and with it
the decision for the first horn of the dilemma of the paradox of subjectivity. The
activity of the transcendental ego in active syntheses is only an indicator of the self-
manifesting teleological activity of the Ur-Ich, the primal ego as ultimate grounding.
The primal ego, the Ur Ich as an “absolute” immortal transcendental ego, lies behind
the intersubjectivity of mortal mundane “empirical” egos.10
The main question for a phenomenological epistemology is whether the onto-
logical solution of the problems of the paradox of subjectivity in the Crisis can
be of significance for the methods that are applicable in the reflective phenomeno-
logical analyses of epistemological problems and problems of a general theory of
knowledge and knowing. The answer in the preliminary considerations of Sects. 2.4
and 3.1 was that the paradox of subjectivity is an unsolvable ontological paradox
only for its ontic interpretation, but not for its epistemic interpretation. An epistemic
interpretation is able to reduce the two horns of the alternative behind the paradox
to the “what” of the givenness in direct and oblique intentions in the epistemic

7
Hua XI, section. III, IV, ch. 1 and 2. Cf. also Hua I §§37–41.
8
It is difficult to find a satisfying translation for the Ur in Ur-Ich in English. Nouns and adjectives
using this prefix in German are translated in many different ways in English, e.g., great grandfather
for Urgroßvater. Using the Greek archē, in German Anfang as Ursprung and known in English in
nouns like archbishop; Ur-Ich could be translated as Arch-Ego. What comes closest in the history
of philosophical terminologies is absolute ego, absolutes Ich, i.e., in the Kantian definition of
“absolute,” “independent and unconditioned in every respect.”
9
Cf Sect. 3.1 above.
10
Cf. the report of Schutz on his last conversation with Husserl in “Husserl and his Influence on
Me” in: CP V.
11.1 Naturalism, Historicism, Historism and the Paradox of Subjectivity 387

perspective. The subject is given to itself in oblique intention as the subject of

the givenness of the world and is given to itself in direct intention as an animated
living body in the world. This thesis does not imply that metaphysical interpretations
are meaningless. The thesis claims only that such metaphysical interpretations are
irrelevant for the methodological approach of the reflections and analyses of a
phenomenological epistemology.
A short summary of some viewpoints that surfaced in metaphysical interpre-
tations in the history of the phenomenological movement is necessary before
turning to the final critical systematic evaluation of this claim. The problem of
“phenomenology and/or metaphysics” dominated discussions of Husserl’s phe-
nomenology in the German literature after the Second World War. Several applica-
tions of phenomenology to metaphysical problems in the broadest sense, including
references to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology as well as to Hegel, can be found
in this tradition. Critical viewpoints rejecting attempts to provide a speculative and
metaphysical ultimate grounding in and for transcendental phenomenology as a
method were discussed in the phenomenological circle at Mainz.11
These discussions after the war were been prepared in discussions connected
with Husserl’s efforts to finish final versions of the Cartesian Meditations and the
Crisis in the Freiburg circle since 1928 and, after Husserl’s death in 1938, continued
in Louvain before the Second World War. The leading figure in these discussions
of Husserl’s research work was Eugen Fink who, influenced by Heidegger’s
ontological experience and his interpretation and critique of German idealism,
prepared, last but not least, the final steps for a speculative metaphysical ultimate
grounding of transcendental phenomenology.12
Husserl’s and Fink’s turn to a speculative metaphysical interpretation of the
transcendental Ego together with the positive references to Heidegger and Hegel,
was accepted by the French participants in these discussions and in general in the
development of French phenomenology. The turn was known but not accepted in
the phenomenological tradition of the New School for Social Research in New
York. Schutz and Cairns participated in the discussions in the Freiburg circle.
Fragments of later writings of Husserl were available before and after the war in
the phenomenological circle at the New School. Schutz agreed with Fink’s doubts
concerning phenomenological justifications for the assumption of the possibility
of a possible genetic constitution of a universe of monads in the individual
transcendental subjectivity of a meditating philosopher, but he rejected Fink’s
speculative quasi-Fichtean solution. The question of the givenness of Others can be
answered with phenomenological reflective analyses of the constitution of passive

11
See Fink 1939, 1952, 1958 and Landgrebe 1948, 1963. A defence of phenomenology as a
method can be found in the publications of Funke 1957, 1966; Müller 1956, Seebohm 1962.
Detailed studies interested in this development can be found in Spiegelberg 1960, vol. II, 596
f. and Seebohm 1962, §29. A short study of the discussions in Germany in English is available in
the first section of Geniusas 2013.
12
On the discussions in the Freiburg phenomenological workshop, see Bruzina 2004, ch. 1.
388 11 Summary and Conclusions

syntheses.13 Schutz’s rejection of Husserl’s and Fink’s speculative ontological

interpretation of the transcendental, the egological, and the primordial reduction
was known in the phenomenological circle of the New School since 1937. His
interpretation and critique was accepted by Dorion Cairns and there are no traces
in the writings of Felix Kaufmann and Aron Gurwitsch of an influence of the
Husserl/Fink speculative metaphysical interpretation of the ultimate grounding of
transcendental phenomenology.14 As mentioned above, the turn to metaphysics
was also not acceptable for the defenders of “method” in the phenomenological
circle in Mainz. Their position can be characterized as “Kantian,” though by no
means as Neo-Kantian, because they denied the intrinsic necessity to go beyond
transcendental phenomenology as a philosophy of reflection in the direction of a
speculative metaphysical ultimate grounding.
There is enough textual evidence for the thesis that Husserl (perhaps, as Schutz
suggested, under the influence of Fink) shared the assumption that a quasi-Fichtean
metaphysical idealism presupposing an ABSOLUTE EGO can serve as the ultimate
absolute grounding of transcendental phenomenology. There are, however, also
interpretations that are philologically correct in every respect and philosophically
acceptable, of passages in Husserl’s late publications and manuscripts in which the
primal ego is mentioned without presupposing these assumptions.15
Presupposing the preliminary considerations of the first two chapters of part I, it
can be said that the ontic attitude in phenomenology presupposes that phenomenol-
ogy is not only a method for reflective analyses. It is in the last instance a method for
the immediate speculative “ontological” experience or intuition of an ABSOLUTE
EGO beyond the ego that is given in phenomenological reflective analyses as the
abstract “pole” of a manifold of cogitations. Such an ABSOLUTE EGO is the
ultimate ground, and as an absolute entity, it posits the emergence of an ego as a
pole together with its correlate, the not yet understood brute reality of the hyletic
field, and with it, the world in the actual standing Now of inner temporality.
According to Sects. 2.4 and 3.1, an epistemic understanding of phenomeno-
logical analyses is sufficient for the application of phenomenological descriptive
analyses to problems of epistemological reflections on the sciences and the system
of the sciences. An ontic interpretation is also sufficient, but this understanding

13
Cf. §7 and Schutz’s essay “The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl,” together
with Fink’s comments with references to the late Fichte (and not to the early Fichte of the
Wissenschaftslehre) and Schutz’s response of 1957 in the English translation in CP III, 84.
14
For recent comparative accounts see Embree 2009a, esp. section 5; Embree 2009b; Reeder 2009
all in Nasu et al. ed. 2009.
15
For discussions of the interpretation of the transcendental ego as primal ego in the Crisis, the C-
manuscripts, and in the writings of Fink, Cairns, and others, cf. now Bruzina 2004, 2013 and
also Moran 2012, 145f. An interpretation without mentioning Fink’s speculative metaphysical
interpretation can be found in Geniusas 2012, ch. 9.
11.1 Naturalism, Historicism, Historism and the Paradox of Subjectivity 389

requires in addition that phenomenology ought to be a method of a speculative

metaphysics, i.e., a method that admits an access to the Letztbegründung in the
primal ego as the ABSOLUTE EGO.16
A solution for the paradox of subjectivity as it is given in the epistemic attitude
presupposes as its foundation a phenomenological analysis of the temporal structure
of the relation between intentional acts in direct and in oblique intention. The objects
of intentional acts in oblique intention have their foundations in the last instance in
acts in direct intention given in the immediate past horizon of the intentional act of
oblique intentions. What is given in an intentional act in direct intention considered
in its own right is an object in the world as “what it is,” i.e., it is immediately given
in its being given as a fact in the world. The subject of an act in oblique intention
knows itself, in addition, in its identity with the subject of the intentional act in direct
intention. It is also aware of its identity in sequences of iterated oblique intentions
that ultimately have their foundation in acts of direct intention. Acts of oblique
intention participate in the last instance in all sequences of intentional acts and
require the priority of the actual Now as the foundation of sequences of retention,
i.e., the past horizon of the actual Now. For the epistemic attitude being is only given
a fact in the in the world as the totality of all beings given in direct intentions. Thus
for the epistemic attitude the subject knows itself as a being, a fact, only in its being
in the world and this means as inseparable from being incorporated “in” its living
animate body living together with other animated and inanimate bodies.
The difference between the ontic and the epistemic attitude is, hence, a difference
in the apprehension of inner time consciousness. As epistemic objects given in the
oblique or reflective attitude temporal structures are abstract structures of concrete
contexts of active and passive syntheses and their correlates. The correlates that are
of interest for the epistemic attitude are the regions of intentional objects given in
active and passive syntheses. For reflections in the epistemic attitude these contexts
are pre-given in the past horizon of actual reflections. But the actual Now of such
contexts is, seen from the perspective of the actual Now of reflections a past actual
Now. In such iterations the actual Now of reflection is only given in the future
horizon of a past actual Now as a not yet given transfinite Now, but not as the
absolute. The actual Now of the ABSOLUTE EGO can, hence, be given only for an
attitude that transcends the epistemic attitude.
Reflective phenomenological analyses are, hence, able to determine the general
structure of the temporality of the primordial ego, the primordial hyletic field,
and the primordial genetic constitution of intersubjectivity along with an inter-
subjectively pre-given lifeworld without presupposing in addition an access to the
ultimate ground of the activity of an ABSOLUTE EGO as an absolute being. A
reflective phenomenological analysis is as such not able to analyze the “awareness”
of its own actual Now as opening an access to the absolute transcendental ego. If
there should be in addition a phenomenology of a higher order beyond “beginning

16
Cf. the interpretations of Fink and Husserl in Bruzina 2013 and Bruzina 2004, 228, n 12, 263f.,
282, 295f.
390 11 Summary and Conclusions

phenomenology,” then it has to transcend the phenomenology of reflective analyses

and precisely that is required if phenomenology can serve in addition as a method
for speculative metaphysical contemplations of a phenomenological ABSOLUTE
EGO. Whatever is given on this higher level is vice versa also not a necessary
foundation for reflective phenomenological analyses. A phenomenological episte-
mology presupposes, as shown, the reflective analysis of all aspects of the genetic
constitution of the lifeworld because the epistemic attitude is a special case of
reflective phenomenological analyses. The experiences of a phenomenology of a
higher order that is required for a speculative metaphysical experience is irrelevant
for epistemological phenomenological reflections.

11.2 The Generative Foundations of the Empirical Sciences

in the Lifeworld

The epistemological investigations in part II had to start with the considerations

about the philological-historical method and the question whether it can be recog-
nized as fulfilling all requirements for a methodology of history to be an empirical
science. They had to start with these considerations because the epistemological
reflections on the human sciences in the last century began with the strict separation
between the natural sciences and the human sciences. They came to an end in the
dispute between the defenders of the priority of the spiritual or historical17 world
and the defenders of the priority of the natural sciences and of naturalism.
Given this situation, it was first of all necessary to show that even the strict
separation between the human sciences and the natural sciences does not hold
water. It fails because the thesis of a strict opposition between the methodology
of the natural sciences guided by the principle of explanation presupposing effi-
cient causal relations and the methodology of the historical human sciences in
general presupposing hermeneutical principles that were originally derived from
the methodology of philological text interpretations does not hold water. It already
fails for the methodology of history as a science because of shortcomings, hasty
generalizations, and ambiguities in the presupposed descriptive analyses of the
methods of historical reconstructions and explanations and their relations to the
presupposed interpretation of the historically relevant sources (Sects. 6.1, 6.2, 6.3
and 6.4).
Additional problems surface in descriptive epistemological analyses of the meth-
ods of the systematic human sciences. “What sciences really do” in psychological
research or research in economics implies methods of experimental research that
have been developed in the life sciences for cases of highly complex structures of

17
One could add to Husserl’s terminology the Neo-Kantian “cultural sciences” (Kulturwis-
senschaften) that was used by Schutz and has emerged in the English literature in recent decades
as a substitute for “human sciences.”
11.2 The Generative Foundations of the Empirical Sciences in the Lifeworld 391

ensembles of initial conditions and ensembles of conditioned effects. Even superfi-

cial reflections about methods in economics already show that a distinction between
economics as a natural science and economics as a science of understanding is
meaningless. Closer considerations have also shown that it is also meaningless to
ask for a strict separation of methods of understanding and experimental methods in
psychological research (Sects. 10.2, 10.3 and 10.5).
The initial steps of any attempts to develop a phenomenological epistemology
of the empirical sciences already have to face a serious difficulty in Husserl’s
later published and unpublished writings. Husserl defended Dilthey’s historism,
praising his understanding of the historical world and his thesis of the priority of the
historical over the natural world as a path to transcendental phenomenology in Ideas
II, in appendices of Phenomenological Psychology, and other writings (Sect. 4.3).
Seen with hindsight, it can be said that this appraisal neglects the possibility of an
epistemic interpretation of historism (one that would admit an epistemology of the
historical human sciences) but prefers instead an ontic interpretation. Given an ontic
interpretation of Dilthey’s historism, only one step is necessary for a transition from
the ontological priority of the historical or spiritual world to the absolute being of
the transcendental EGO versus the merely relative being of the world.
It was a disputed question among the phenomenologists in the tradition of
the New School for Social Research in New York whether or not this way out
was necessary for the further development of phenomenological research. The
alternative was to start with the priority of a phenomenological analysis of the basic
structures of the lifeworld in general because the results of this analysis provide
a sufficient system of structures “a priori” for all further intentional intentional
analyses of cogitative types of higher degrees of complexity. There is enough
textual evidence in Husserl’s later writings that such an approach is also compatible
with the research program for a phenomenological philosophy indicated in his
earlier writings. The dilemma causes, of course, a widely neglected problem for the
philological interpretations of Husserl’s late unpublished writings.18 It is, however,
obvious that choosing the first way out and opting for the absolute Being of a
transcendental Ego necessarily end in a Fichtean type of speculative idealism that
is no longer interested in pedestrian epistemological reflections on empirical and
formal sciences that restrict themselves to an epistemic understanding of their
results.
One of the basic epistemological principles of the empirical sciences (one
accepted even in the analytic philosopher’s theory of science) requires that only
intersubjectively verifiable observations can be recognized as the empirical founda-
tions of empirical sciences in general. Observations are intersubjectively verifiable

18
The problem is whether Husserl was either unaware of the incompatibilities between the
recognition of the phenomenological analysis of the lifeworld as the region of ultimate grounding,
and an ultimate metaphysical grounding beyond the lifeworld as the foundation for further
phenomenological research or whether he was aware of it and offered a solution has not yet been
shown in his unpublished writings. A solution for this problem is not of significance for attempts
to develop a phenomenological epistemology of the empirical sciences.
392 11 Summary and Conclusions

only if all of their parts, the pre-given intersensorially observable phenomena,

are also accessible for Others. The recognition of such observables requires their
accessibility in principle not only for contemporaries in the present, but also as iden-
tifiable with the same or at least equal intersensory observables in the future horizon
for contemporaries and/or their successors. The requirement of an empirical basis in
intersubjectively verifiable observations is a requirement for all empirical sciences
and, hence, for the human sciences as well. The originally pre-given intersensory
observables for the theories of the natural sciences are the phenomena that represent
the reality of the natural environment in the lifeworld. The immediately pre-given
intersensory observables for the interpretations carried out by the human sciences
are phenomena that represent immediate and fixed life expressions of Others in
the lifeworld. Objective validity and intersubjective validity are correlates. The
phenomenological analysis of the constitution of intersubjectivity, and with it the
lifeworld as objective correlate of intersubjectivity, presupposes the analysis of the
primary and secondary passive constitution of the givenness of the Other in the
primordial sphere (Sect. 3.1).
The structure of a lifeworld with sciences has its generative but also its static
foundations in certain partial structures of the lifeworld in general, i.e., the pri-
mordial structures that are pre-given as structures of pre-scientific lived experience.
These basic structures of a lifeworld in general have been analyzed in part I of
the main text. For a phenomenological epistemology the analysis of the system of
foundations of the empirical sciences has to start with an exposition of the structure
of certain aspects of the deepest layer of these foundations, aspects that have been
considered in part I.
Of basic significance for these investigations is first of all the phenomenological
typology of understanding and its distinctions between animalic, elementary, and
higher understanding and for all three types the distinction between first-order
understanding, and second-order understanding (Sect. 3.2). Of basic significance
is, furthermore, the phenomenological analysis of different types of causal relations
and their foundations in the structures of subjective and intersubjective temporality.
These analyses had to begin with the primordial temporal structures of the emer-
gence of contents in the hyletic field because these structures are the foundation
and justification for the objective validity of the conscious cogitative types in
which different types of causality, i.e., effective, formal, and final causes, causal
explanations and predictions, are given in the lifeworld (Sect. 3.5).
The structure of the system of the empirical sciences has the deepest layer of
its foundations in different types of intersensory observations and the types that
are correlates, i.e., given in reciprocal foundation relations with different abstract
aspects of social practical interactions and collective interactions that are immediate
correlates of practical interactions on the level of elementary understanding.
There is (1) the aspect of the encounter with the natural environment in practical
interactions. The natural environment indicates itself only as an blind and brute, i.e.,
not yet “understood,” power of reality in disappointments of primordial expectations
in the sphere of ownness and then of intersubjective tacit and explicit expectations
in practical interactions (Sects. 3.1 and 3.5).
11.2 The Generative Foundations of the Empirical Sciences in the Lifeworld 393

There is (2) the first-order understanding of the purpose or the system of purposes
of practical interactions together with the values that determine the purposes as
in-order-to-motives of the participants in the practical interaction. The purpose
of practical social interactions determines as “final” cause the selection of the
“efficient” causal relations that can be discovered in the natural environment and
serve as means for the realization of the purpose(s). Such means can be certain
materials offered by the natural environment, or they can be the use of tools, but
they can also be certain actions of certain participants in the interactions.
It is (3) necessary for successful interactions that both (3.a) the system of
purposes (3.b) the system of applicable means for the realization of the purpose(s)
are recognized and accepted systems for the participants in the interactions.
Presupposed for (3) is (4) the possibility of successful communications between
the participants of practical interactions in civil interactions eliminating misun-
derstandings and not-understandings on the level of secondary understanding, i.e.,
the understanding of the first-order understanding of Others about the choice
and/or understanding of purposes, or about difficulties in the selection and/or the
application of means. The correlate of the possibility of successful communications
is the possibility of failing communications that end in partial and even total
disagreement. The outcome of total disagreement is the disruption and even the
destruction of practical interactions. The consequences of total disagreement about
purposes on the level of higher understanding can be violent hostile interactions
disrupting all civil interactions.
Referring to the analyses of the preceding investigations, (1) is the foundation and
(2) is bracketed by the methodological abstraction of the natural sciences (Sect. 7.2).
If (2) is bracketed, then (3) and (4) are bracketed, but it has to be kept in mind that
(3) is a necessary dependent part and, hence, a presupposition also in the structure
of the practical interactions of scientists in laboratories; it is involved in organizing
intersensory observations without itself ever being an object of the natural sciences
in its own right.
The second-order understanding of first-order understanding of Others (4) is of
basic significance for the human sciences, but it is also of basic significance that (4)
implies (3) on the level of elementary understanding in the lifeworld, and (3) implies
(2) and its correlate (1). The thesis that human sciences can only be interested
in interpretations and not in causal explanations is misleading. Of significance is,
furthermore, that encounters with brute reality happen for elementary understanding
in the pre-scientific lifeworld only in (1). The human sciences without a foundation
in (1) are, hence, hanging in the clouds of interpretations that have lost contact with
the reality that is given in the encounter with the natural environment as brute, blind,
and not yet interpreted reality.
A possible emergence of empirical sciences in cultural traditions presupposes
further levels of foundations in the development of such cultural traditions. The
counting of objects and the measuring of spatial distances were already of interest
for elementary practical understanding in cultures without a literary tradition
(Sects. 8.1 and 8.2). Counting and measuring were also implied in the elementary
understanding of trading products, tools, materials, and human labor (Sect. 10.5).
394 11 Summary and Conclusions

Traces of rudimentary knowledge of theorems about arithmetical operations and

geometrical constructions can be found in the earliest phases of literary cultures.
Geometry and arithmetic were later recognized as systems of higher understanding
representing deductive sciences (Sect. 8.2).
Of significance for reflections on the generative foundations of the empirical
sciences is that new inventions in mathematical sciences before the emergence of
the empirical sciences have only been applied in the invention of sophisticated
tools and weapons and in architecture, i.e., in cases where new technologies are
applied in practical interactions. However, neither arithmetic nor geometry was
applied in physics before the emergence of the modern empirical sciences. The
systematic application of mathematics in physics presupposed first the transition
from arithmetic to algebra and then the algebraic calculation of geometrical relations
and proportions in analytic geometry (Sects. 8.1 and 8.3).
Of significance for the foundations of empirical sciences on the level of higher
understanding in literary traditions are, furthermore, the meta-genres of philosoph-
ical contemplations that are interested in theories of how things are given for
their own sake after bracketing all practical interests and involvements (Sect. 8.3).
One of the two main genres of pre-scientific philosophy is practical philosophy.
The theories of practical philosophy are interested in the systems of norms and
values that determine the guiding purposes of systems of social interactions. Special
disciplines of practical philosophy are the philosophy of the law, of politics, and
of economics. The system of these disciplines of practical philosophy is a pre-
figuration of the system of the three disciplines of the empirical social sciences.
The Diltheyan system of systematic human sciences is complete if psychology, a
discipline of theoretical philosophy, is added. There is, however, in that time no
philosophical discipline that can be considered as a foundation of the historical
human sciences.
The cognitive attitude of theoretical philosophy does not only bracket immediate
involvements in practical life. It also brackets the interest in theoretical reflections
on systems of norms and values carried out in practical philosophy. The two main
disciplines of pre-scientific theoretical philosophy are physics and metaphysics.
Physics is the theory of the phenomena that are left after bracketing abstractions
that are constitutive for the cognitive attitude of theoretical philosophy. Left are
observables that belong to physis, nature, and the possibility of discovering regular-
ities in the ongoing changes that can be conceptualized as efficient and as formal
causal relations determining temporal sequences of regular change. Metaphysics in
pre-scientific philosophy could be understood as the theory of the “first principles”
of physics in the old sense.
By including the theoretical interest of theoretical dogmatic reflections of reli-
gious systems, it was possible to understand the God of metaphysics as the highest
principle of all principles of physis. However, it was also possible to reduce meta-
physics to a theory of the principles of physics, i.e., of atoms and the efficient causal-
ity determining mechanistic systems of the movements of atoms. The elimination of
metaphysical theories (including divine powers and final causes) in the naturalistic
metaphysics of, e.g., Democritus and Epicurus is a philosophical pre-figuration of
the methodological abstraction that determines the region of the natural sciences.
11.2 The Generative Foundations of the Empirical Sciences in the Lifeworld 395

Essential for the generative foundations of the philological-historical human

sciences in pre-scientific literary cultures is scholarship as a meta-genre of higher
understanding. Scholarship is interested in interpretations of the texts and monu-
ments that represent the tradition of a culture and its application in the present.
The name for this meta-genre of higher understanding in Classical Antiquity
was philologia. Rhetoric as part of philologia was the art of the application of
the wisdom of the interpreted tradition of texts. Philology in this sense already
developed a hermeneutics, i.e., a doctrine of methods for the correct reading and
understanding of texts (Sect. 4.1). Certain rules of hermeneutics were applied in the
Middle Ages in the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures. The method was fully restored
and extended by the humanists in the Renaissance. It finally appeared first as a
methodology of the science of Classical Antiquity and then of scientific philological
research in general (Sect. 5.1).
Two remarks and a caveat must now be added. (1) Counterparts of the scholarship
of the philologists in Classical Antiquity can be found in all developed literary
traditions in other cultures, e.g., the Chinese, the Indian, and the Arabic cultural
traditions. Such literary traditions include geometrical, arithmetical, algebraic,
astronomical, and other branches of mathematical literature. Their knowledge about
their natural environment in elementary understanding but also in systems of
higher understanding is comparable with the development of Western European
literature before the emergence of the empirical sciences and has influenced the
cultural development of Western Europe. What has been said about the sequence of
generative and static foundations for a possible emergence of the empirical sciences
is, hence, only a case study of the development of the foundations of different levels
of lower and higher understanding and their sedimentations in the developed and
complex literary traditions in general.
(2) The traditional epistemology of the last century subsumed the historical and the
systematic human sciences under the heading of “sciences of understanding.” It
should have been, however, some food for second thought that different types of
“sciences of understanding” have quite different foundations in the development
of literary traditions. The social sciences have generative foundations in the
disciplines of pre-scientific practical philosophy. Psychology as a systematic
human science in Dilthey’s sense has one of its foundations in psychology as
a discipline of theoretical philosophy. The historical human sciences have, on
the contrary, foundations in the philological scholarship and the art of historical
narrations in Classical Antiquity. Philosophers in Classical Antiquity, and even
still in the beginning of the nineteenth century have always argued that these
disciplines are only able to know the facts but are unable to know the truth. In
the contrast, philologists and humanists considered their knowledge as universal
wisdom that includes philosophical wisdom (Sects. 3.4 and 4.1). Epistemolog-
ical problems that have their roots in the different foundations of the historical
and the systematic human sciences will be considered in the next section.
(3) A correct understanding of what has been said in the present section requires
keeping in mind that foundations are logically only necessary and not sufficient
conditions (2). It is, hence, only a historical fact that the transition to the
396 11 Summary and Conclusions

development of a system of empirical sciences happened only in Western

Europe. It is the task of historical research to discover the sufficient conditions
in the specific historical circumstances that are responsible for this historical
fact.

11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences:

Concluding Remarks

The preceding investigations had to start with a critical deconstruction of the pre-
suppositions of the strict separation between the sciences of explanation (Erklären)
and the sciences of understanding (Verstehen) in the tradition of the last century.
The main task for the preceding investigations was the rejection of the thesis that
the methodology of history, including in its fringes pre-history and contemporary
history, can be reduced to a hermeneutics that had its basis in reflections on the
methods of interpretations of fixed life expressions, i.e., texts and monuments. After
the summary of the analyses of the generative foundations of the emergence of
the empirical sciences in the last section, it is now possible that the summary of
conclusions relevant for the system of the empirical sciences is able to follow the
historical order of the emergence of the disciplines of the empirical sciences.
Some traditional epistemologists of the empirical sciences, e.g., J.S. Mill,
emphasized the analysis of the logic of the method of experimental research in
general. Others, e.g., Descartes, Kant, but also Husserl in the Crisis, emphasized
the significance of the application of mathematical theories for the methodology
of the natural sciences. A tacit assumption behind this approach is that it in the
future will be possible to reduce the life sciences to the hard sciences. Seen from
the viewpoint of phenomenological psychology, the advantage of the empiricism
of Mill and his predecessors is that this approach covers the ground of the
methodological abstraction that is constitutive for the natural sciences in general.
The methodology of the experiment requires that generalized conditionals that refer
to cause-effect relations can be confirmed or disconfirmed in predictions referring
to the consequent and presupposing in the antecedent the givenness of the cause
plus initial required circumstantial conditions. The givenness has to be givenness
in intersensory observations. The ideal methodological case is that the generalized
conditional should be derivable from a theory.
The methodology of the experiment is of basic significance for the hard natural
sciences, i.e., first of all physics, and for the soft natural sciences, i.e., the life
sciences. The residuum of the methodological abstraction includes the region of
objects determined by categorial structures that are of significance for the soft as
well as for the hard sciences. The methodological abstraction excludes the region
of objects that cannot be recognized as objects accessible for the empirical natural
sciences (Sect. 7.1 and 7.2). This methodological abstraction restricts the empirical
basis to objects and categories that are constitutive for possible objects that can
be given in intersensory observations in elementary first-order and second-order
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks 397

understanding. All other types of objects, purposes, values, norms, but also any
access to the conscious lived experience of other persons, though presupposed in
the requirement of intersensory experience, are excluded from the residuum of the
abstraction.
According to the general methodological abstraction of the natural sciences the
application of mathematical techniques, including statistical and other mathematical
techniques, is not restricted to the hard sciences. It was and is a necessary implement
of all empirical sciences, first of all the life sciences (Sect. 8.5), but then also, e.g.,
the systematic human sciences such as economics (Sect. 10.5). Such applications are
even possible in the historical human sciences in grammatical and even individual
hermeneutics, i.e., the methodology of philological text interpretations (Sect. 5.2).
The foundation for this type of universal applicability of mathematics in the
empirical sciences is that counting and measuring are already necessary implements
of the elementary understanding of practical and civil social interactions in archaic
cultural lifeworlds and systems of higher understanding in such cultural lifeworlds.
The application of mathematics in physics is different. It presupposes as one of
its foundations mathematics as a formal science, i.e., as a meta-genre of higher
understanding in its own right, including algebra and the algebraic treatment of
geometry in analytic geometry (Sects. 8.1 and 8.2). Significant “revolutions” in
the progress of physics always presupposed progress in mathematical research. The
application of mathematics in physics (and only in physics among the empirical
sciences) implies that algebraic formulas and equations are used from the outset
in the definitions of the basic categories of the region of the theoretical entities
of physics. The theoretical objects of the theories in physics must, hence, be
distinguished from the objects given for intersensory observations in experimental
research. An immediate consequence of this distinction is that objects of intersen-
sory observations are objects for physics only to the extent to which their properties
and relations are measurable. Observable properties of objects in experiments
serving to test theoretical hypotheses of physics have to be reduced to one genus of
their dependent parts, i.e., the abstract moments that belong to the genus extension
(Sect. 8.2).
A further implication is that pictorial representations in the strict sense are
possible only for the objects that are given for intersensory observations in
experimental research. The methodological abstraction that determines the region
of the theoretical objects of physics is, hence, a reductive abstraction. Answers to
problems of possible quasi-pictorial or even only per analogiam quasi-pictorial
representations of theoretical objects presuppose an analysis of the level of the
development of the mathematical theories that have been applied in the theories
of physics.
The first step beyond Cartesian mechanistic push-pull physics was the Newtonian
application of differential and integral calculus in the theory of gravitation. The
mathematical objects required for this step are exact essences that can be given in
variations in imagination that are determined by a rule-governed process of an and-
so-on progress toward an ideal limit. Representations of the objects of mathematics
on this level of its development and, hence, theoretical objects of classical physics
as well are accessible in quasi-pictorial representations (Sect. 8.2).
398 11 Summary and Conclusions

The methodological difference between classical and post-classical physics

has its foundations in the difference between the above mentioned idealizations
of classical mathematics that are applied in classical physics, on the one hand,
and on the other hand, post-classical mathematics. The objects of post-classical
mathematics are given in formalizing abstraction, and this implies that they can
only be given in quasi-pictorial representations per analogiam, abstractions that
have merely heuristic value (Sect. 8.3). However, everything that can be said on
the level of formalized abstractions about the theoretical entities of physics is of
significance for physics as an empirical science only if it permits the derivation of
theorems that cover already given experimental evidences or admit confirmation or
disconfirmation in future experiments.
A phenomenological epistemology of the empirical sciences has to presuppose
the phenomenological theory of the cognitive attitude in which the objects of a
mathesis universalis in the broad sense of a general formal ontology are given
(Sect. 2.2). Two regions in the mathesis universalis understood in this sense can
be distinguished. There is first the mathesis universalis in the narrower sense, i.e.,
the region of the pure formal algebraic structures of the objects that are given on
the material level as objects of idealizations in the region of phenomena belonging
to the genus extension. The second region is the region of the formal ontology of
the whole and the parts (Sect. 2.2). Only the first region is of interest for physics.
In contrast, what is of interest for the categorial structures of the objects of the life
sciences is the formal ontological theory of the whole and the parts.
Objects of classical physics presuppose a second methodological abstraction in
the realm of objects given in the residuum of the first abstractive reduction that is
constitutive for the natural sciences in general. However, the life sciences presup-
pose only the first methodological abstraction. They have to start with descriptions
of life forms, the different empirical types, i.e., species of organisms and their
internal structures. The descriptions are “phenomenological” in the old sense (Sect.
2.1), i.e., they are interested in the empirical type of the external gestalt of living
organisms, their internal anatomical and physiological structures, and the structures
of the web of relations between specific empirical types and their environments.
The second step is the classification of different empirical types of organisms.
The main problem of the construction of taxonomies is the selection of specific
differences of properties first in descriptions of the external gestalt and then in
the other descriptive dimensions just mentioned that determine different degrees
of similarities and affinities between species. A basic requirement is that such
descriptions are able to refer on this level to their objects in pictorial representations,
and this remains a requirement for all levels of research in the life sciences down to
pictorial representations of the internal structures of monocellular organisms and up
to the interpretation of fossils that can serve as traces for the reconstruction of the
history of the evolution of species (Sect. 8.5).
Seen from the viewpoint of formal ontology, living organisms are organic
wholes, i.e., first-order independent wholes that presuppose a generation in which
their gestalt as form of an independent whole is realized (Sect. 2.2). The material
ontological characteristics of different species of living organisms with more or less
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks 399

complex forms given in the lifeworld are already given in intersensory observations
for elementary understanding as having a genesis with a beginning in “seeds,”
such that something realizes or “actualizes” itself and deteriorates in the end.
Intersensory observation on the level of elementary understanding also teaches that
living organisms are able to reproduce other living organisms of their own species
in different ways.
Pre-scientific philosophical ontology already introduced the ontological category
of formal cause as the force behind the actualization of the generation of the form
of living organisms out of dead inorganic matter. Formal causes have often been
interpreted as final causes, i.e., purposes, in the Aristotelian tradition (Sects. 8.3
and 8.5).19 A methodological analysis of experiments in the life science before
the twentieth century indicates that most of these experiments refer to cases in
which efficient causes promote, disturb, or destroy the “force” behind the formal
causes, but an explication in terms of an empirical science of this “formal cause”
was missing. Before turning to the problems connected with this lacuna in the life
sciences four basic achievements of the life sciences in the nineteenth century must
be mentioned.
The four discoveries are (1) that higher life forms are complex symbiotic
systems of cells; (2) that the simplest organic structures are the external and
internal structures of monocellular living organisms; (3) that the smallest parts of
monocellular organisms are complex molecular structures of organic chemistry; and
(4) Darwin’s theory of the evolution of life forms. Of epistemological significance is
that the “conditions of the possibility” of the “discoveries” are abstractions based on
descriptions of intersensory observations. The observations (2) and (3) presuppose
sophisticated instruments, and the construction of the instruments presupposes
technological applications of the results of experimental research in the hard natural
sciences, e.g., optics. Progress in the life sciences has, hence, one of the generative
foundations of the empirical basis of its intersensory observations in the progress of
the hard sciences.
It is tempting to understand the transition from (2) to (3) as an ontic reduction
of organic life to inorganic matter. Seen from the viewpoint of a phenomenological
epistemology, however, it is only possible to recognize that the discovery of (1) has
its epistemic foundation in (2) and that the discovery of (3) also has its epistemic
foundation in (2). It is possible to assume in an ontic interpretation that (3) is the
genetic foundation of (2) and (2) is the foundation of (1), but it depends of the state
of the art whether it can be shown in experiments that (2) is the effect of a specific
sets of factors in (3), i.e., not only as a necessary but also as a sufficient effective
condition.

19
The actualization of the form of a living organism was understood as an analogue of the
realization of a purpose. Even Kant’s transcendental reflections in KGS V Kritik der Urteilskraft
on the life sciences had to refer to teleology and with it to the purposes and final causes of pre-
scientific philosophy in his interpretation of the meaning of “formal cause.”
400 11 Summary and Conclusions

Darwin’s “theory” of the evolution (4) of the species is not a theory like e.g.,
the kinetic theory of gases or of the function of the liver in the metabolism of
mammals. It is rather a history, and the research leading to its discovery shares,
notwithstanding essential “specific” differences, some essential aspects with the
reconstructions of a past reality in historical research in the human sciences. The
method of a history of the evolution beginning with monocellular organisms up
to animals of the species homo habilis, homo erectus, and homo sapiens starts
with the “interpretation” of fossils, i.e., traces of past life forms. For Darwin, the
guiding thread of the reconstruction of past real developments was geology. The
presuppositions of the reconstruction of life forms from the very beginning are,
hence, the reconstructions of the natural history of the planet Earth. Fossils are
the traces of past organic life, and it is the task of paleontology to reconstruct the
forms of organic life in “interpretations” of the traces. There is, hence, a formal
epistemological analogy between the methods applied in the history of evolution
and the methods applied in the reconstructions of history as a human science. This
has further implications that will be considered below. Such further considerations
presuppose the explication of “form” and “formal cause” in the life sciences as
empirical sciences (Sects. 8.5 and 9.1).
According to the discoveries just considered the origin of the development of
organic forms is given as an origin in certain phases at different places in the
history of nature (Sect. 8.5). The organic forms of a species, forms that have
been considered as formal causes determining the course of the generation of
individuals belonging to the species are understood as products of the generation
of organic forms themselves. Given the state of the art it is neither necessary nor
possible to give a satisfactory categorial explication of the ways in which genetic
codes internally pre-determine the development of organisms or of the external and
internal factors that are able to cause changes in genetic codes. What can be said is
that “genetic code” is the explication of the ontological category “formal cause” in
terms of the life sciences as empirical sciences.
The problem of this lacuna in the life sciences was a welcome occasion for the
attempts of the theologico-metaphysical creationists of the nineteenth and even in
the twentieth century to explain the “teleology” determining the forms of living
organisms and their development as “caused” by a divine intelligence. This answer
transcends all possible epistemological reflections that are restricted to reflections on
what really happens in empirical research in the empirical sciences. The epistemol-
ogy of analytic philosophy deduces the possibility of a reduction of the life sciences
to physics from an epistemologically normative (and even in addition ontological)
physicalism but others also recognized the possibility of, and even the need for such
a reduction.20 Seen from the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology such
answers to the problem also transcend the possibilities of reflection on what really
happens in empirical research.

20
In his Third Critique Kant recognized the problem that explanations in the life sciences that use
analogues of final and formal causes are only of significance as heuristic means for the discovery of
causations that are explicable in terms of classical physics. Husserl’s Crisis was able to neglect the
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks 401

Following this explication it is possible to understand formal causes as genetic

codes, and the task of empirical research is to decipher these codes. The metaphors
“code” and “deciphering” already indicate a certain similarity with linguistic
methods that have been applied for the solution of problems of deciphering texts
written in an unknown language in lower hermeneutics. Statistical mathematical
methods have also been applied in linguistic research looking for solutions of
deciphering problems.
“Formal causes” that determine the development of organic forms are genetic
codes that admit a deciphering, i.e., an interpretation of the code as an “instruction”
that determines the development of the gestalt or form of the organic species. The
history of organic species admits determining changes and then also the discovery
of effective causes that are responsible for the changes in genetic codes.
There is, hence, (1) a certain analogy in the epistemological structures between
the “deciphering” of a genetic code as determining the generation of an organic
species and its gestalt on the one hand and the “reading” of a certain text written in
an unknown written language and the deciphering of its meaning on the other.
There is also (2) a certain analogy in the epistemological structures between the
“reading” and reconstruction of organic life forms in past periods of the history of
evolution with the aid of fossils, the traces of past life, and the “reading” of certain
historical sources, the traces of a past period and the reconstruction of a past reality
with the aid of the sources in history as a human science.
An analysis of these analogies requires a summary of the basic epistemological
structures of the human sciences. The immediately pre-given objects of intersensory
observations of the human sciences are life expressions. The first task of research in
the human sciences is the interpretation of these life expressions. Essential for the
problems of the methodologies of the human sciences are the immediate and fixed
life expressions of consociates and contemporaries in the present and the fixed life
expressions of predecessors in the past.
The first task for the systematic human sciences is the interpretation of life
expressions in the present. Interpretations of fixed life expressions of authors
in the past are of interest only to the degree to which they are relevant for
the interpretations of present life expressions. The social sciences in particular
presuppose social history, but the historical dimension is only of significance as
the source of material for the construction of empirical and ideal types of systems
of social interactions (Sect. 10.4). In this respect reflections on the methodologies
of the systematic human sciences presuppose reflections on the methodology of the
historical human sciences.
The historical human sciences are interested in fixed life expressions of authors
in the historical past. Pre-scientific secondary understanding of the first-order

problem because it does not distinguish between the methodological abstraction that is constitutive
for the natural sciences in general and the additional abstraction within this first reduction that is
constitutive for physics. The immediate consequence is once again that the life sciences ought to
be reducible to physics.
402 11 Summary and Conclusions

understanding that is represented in fixed life expressions is the immediate foun-

dation for methodologically guided secondary understanding of these fixed life
expressions, i.e., first of all of texts in philological interpretations. An essential
condition for the possibility of philology as an empirical science is that fixed life
expressions can be given again as the same (or in high-quality copies) for critical
re-considerations not only of the pre-scientific secondary understanding, but also of
pre-given methodologically guided interpretations.
Methodologies of empirical sciences require methodological abstractions that
both determine the region of the objects that can be recognized as objects of
the empirical science and exclude all other types of objects. Such methodological
abstractions have to determine a distance between researchers and research activities
on the one hand and the objects of research on the other. This distance is the
presupposition for so-called disinterested observations and applications of methods.
In the case of philology as an empirical science, the required distance is a quasi-
historical distance. It prevents the process of interpretation from modifying the
original intentions of the first-order understanding of the authors of texts. The first
canon of hermeneutics is the first principle of the methodology of text interpretation.
The quasi-historical principle requires that a text has to be understood on all levels
of hermeneutics out of the context of texts in this text’s past horizon. The canon is a
methodological abstraction because it determines that the context of a text includes
only texts in the past horizon of the text and excludes all other contexts of texts in the
future horizon of the text, especially the context of the interpreter, i.e., it separates
interpretation and application.
The universal formal methodological principle of methodologically guided
interpretations is the hermeneutical canon of the whole and the parts. Seen from
the viewpoint of a phenomenological epistemology, this canon is the indicator of
the possibility of deriving methodical rules that have to be applied on all levels of
philological hermeneutics. Both canons are also of significance for archaeological
interpretations of monuments and traces (Sects. 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4).
The task of history as a science is the reconstruction of a past reality. This
reconstruction presupposes texts as its material, texts that have already been philo-
logically interpreted. Texts are possible historical sources if they refer explicitly or
implicitly to reports about events in a past real lifeworld. Of significance for the
philological-historical method is, furthermore, that all texts implicitly indicate an
author in the historical past. All fixed life expressions implicitly refer to authors in
the past because a fixed life expression without an author is an eidetic impossibility.
However, this reference has only the character of an empty indicator. It is the task
of biographical historical research to determine the place and the historical period
of the authors (Sect. 5.5).
The reconstruction of a past reality and its historical events or historical “facts”
of history as a science presuppose philologically interpreted sources, but the
methodology of historical reconstructions presupposes in addition a pre-given
framework of temporal and spatial coordinates that admit the determination of
the precise location of historical events and facts in this frame. Without such a
framework history is reduced to historical narrations and myths as pre-scientific
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks 403

literary genres that can serve different purposes, e.g., religious and moral education
but also simple entertainment (Sect. 5.4). Given such a frameworks, however,
historical research is able to apply different types of historical conditions and
explanations, including explanations borrowed from the natural sciences. Causal
explanations borrowed from the natural sciences can also be applied in looking for
solutions to problems of the determination of the spatial and temporal location of
sources, including texts but also archeological traces and monuments.
Epistemological justifications for this aspect of the methodology of historical
research cannot be derived from the methodological principles of philological inter-
pretations. Such a justification requires, hence, further analyses of the foundations of
historical reconstructions in the structures of the intersubjective temporal and spatial
structures of first-order elementary understanding. A survey of the above-mentioned
analogies and parallels in the methodologies of the life sciences and the historical
human sciences is a useful preparation for such analyses. To start with the historical
human sciences is advisable because problems connected with such analyses in the
systematic human sciences are of an even higher degree of complexity.
Analyses of analogies require the determination of what is the same and what is
different in the analogues. What is the same in the analogies in the epistemological
structures of the methodologies of reading, deciphering, and reconstruction of past
events admits explications in terms of the formal ontological theory of wholes and
parts (Sect. 2.2). Objects of classical physics can be first-order wholes that have only
dependent parts. The objects of the life sciences are organic wholes, i.e., wholes with
parts that are wholes of the first order, but cannot be at the same time parts of a higher
order. Objects of the historical human sciences, i.e., texts, fixed life expressions in
general, reconstructed past real lifeworlds, and empirical or ideal types of systems of
social interactions are wholes with parts that are themselves independent wholes that
can indeed be parts of more than one whole of a higher order (Sects. 5.2 and 5.5).
Equal are, hence, the formal ontological structures of the objects as wholes of a
higher order. The difference is only a difference in the degree of the complexity of
part-whole relations.
The difference in the analogy is a difference of the material categories that
determine the parts and wholes in types of objects that are accessible in the life
sciences and in the philological-historical sciences. The methodology of interpreting
texts already presupposes on the level of grammatical hermeneutics that the meaning
of signs in written languages are pre-given for the secondary understanding of
a first-order understanding. There is only a certain material similarity between
the methods of deciphering texts written in an unknown written language and
deciphering genetic codes. What is equal is the application of the method of trial
and error, starting with assumptions about the significance of the signs of the code
and confirmations/disconfirmations of the assumptions, but what is assumed and
how it is confirmed or disconfirmed is different.
Moreover, the method of philological deciphering is interested in the deciphering
of contexts of meaning for a secondary understanding of the signs of the text.
The text is successfully deciphered to the degree to which it can be translated into
meaning contexts that can be expressed in other already known written languages
404 11 Summary and Conclusions

(Sect. 5.2). The deciphering of genetic codes is different because it is in this case a
deciphering not of the meaning of signs, but of sequences of markers that determine
the temporal process of a formation of an organic whole. A stronger analogy for
this type of deciphering is the deciphering of programs of computer languages. The
markers have to be understood in both cases as instructions, i.e., as commands to
perform an action in the first-order understanding of the scientists who are able to
decipher the genetic code or the code of the computer program.
The difference is that the program for a computer language has always been
designed in a process of practical interactions that has been guided by the purpose of
designing precisely this program for a language with certain properties. To assume
an “intelligent design” behind genetic codes and the evolution of such codes in the
evolution of the species is a meaningful metaphysical explication of formal causes
as final causes. However, such a design is not as such a possible object of natural
sciences because it presupposes categories that are excluded from the residuum of
the methodological abstraction that is constitutive for the natural sciences.
Darwin’s “theory” of evolution presupposes fossils as material for the recon-
struction of past organisms, i.e., traces of organisms that lived in a past period of the
history of nature given for present intersensory observation. The reconstructions of
history as a human science presuppose traces, i.e., fixed life expressions given in the
present for intersensory observation and possible interpretations. The analogy of the
methods of deciphering traces and reconstructing a past reality in the life sciences
and in the historical human sciences is of basic significance for the analysis of the
overlap of paleontological reconstructions of the evolution of the human species
and the reconstructive interpretations of human cultural lifeworlds in pre-history
(Sect. 9.1).
The analogies considered have their foundations in the structures of the primor-
dial constitution of the givenness of Others as living animate bodies and of an
intersubjectively given lifeworld as conditions of the possibility of animalic and
elementary understanding as well as of social interactions with Others. However, in
the last instance this first-order understanding is the foundation for the intersensory
observations that are presupposed on the level of empirical research in the empirical
sciences (Sects. 3.1 and 3.2). The Other is originally given as an animate living
body, and in a lifeworld with sciences after the methodological abstraction of the
natural sciences, an animate living body is given as an organism.
The empirical material of historical human sciences is the region of fixed life
expressions of authors in a distant past. The region of empirical material for the
systematic human sciences includes, in addition, fixed life expressions of contem-
poraries and immediate life expressions of contemporaries that are accessible for
intersensory observations in the present. This seems to be an advantage because
it implies the possibility of the application of methods that are able to confirm or
disconfirm predictions. It is thus tempting to accept the positivistic thesis that the
principles of the methodology of the systematic human sciences can be reduced to
the principles of the methodology of the natural sciences. A difference is that the
degree of the complexity of the clusters of factors in the initial conditions and in the
effects is much higher in the systematic human sciences than in the natural sciences.
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks 405

The positivistic thesis has to face the additional difficulty that only immediately
given intersensory observations are needed for verifications of initial conditions and
of predicted effects in the natural sciences. Predictions in the systematic human
sciences presuppose, on the contrary, interpretations of life expressions that are
accessible in present intersensory observations. An epistemological analysis of the
methodology of confirmation or disconfirmation of predictions in the systematic
human sciences must, hence, start with the epistemological analysis of the method-
ology of interpretations in the systematic human sciences (Sect. 10.1). What follows
is a summary of the results of the preceding investigations without references to the
discussion of the different positions in the literature in part IV.
Prima facie there are no methodological and epistemological problems because
secondary understanding of immediate linguistic life expressions of Others in
present communications “works” without the need to apply methodologically
guided interpretations. The problem is, however, that interpretations in the his-
torical human sciences are able to perform a methodological abstraction that is
constitutive for the possibility of separating interpretation and application and thus
of the cognitive attitude of “disinterested” interpretations in the historical human
sciences (Sect. 10.2), This distance vanishes gradually in contemporary history and
completely in the secondary understanding of life expressions of Others in present
communications. The question is, hence, how methodologically guided eliminations
of misunderstanding and not-understanding in interpretations are possible in the
systematic human sciences (Sect. 10.1).
Phenomenological reflections on possible eliminations of misunderstanding and
not-understanding in the present have to start with the analysis of eliminating
misunderstandings and not-understanding in dialogical communications. Dialogues
that are interested in repairing disturbed communications between participants in
the dialogue are productive dialogues (Sect. 10.2). Interpretation and application
cannot and ought not to be separated in such dialogues. The common goal of all
participants in the dialogue is to determine agreements or disagreements in the first-
order understanding of the participants.
It is, however, also possible that a participant interrupts the process of productive
dialogue and brackets the common interest of the participants in the first-order
understanding of a state of affairs with questions that refer to what other participants
mean, what they think about the subject matter of the dialogue. It is also possible
that an interrogator in a pure diagnostic dialogue is only interested in the secondary
understanding of the first-order understanding of their partners in the dialogue. The
attitude of such interrogators is the attitude of a disinterested interpreter, and is
the presupposition of the possibility of separating interpretation and application in
dialogues and communication in general. The problem of developing methodolo-
gies for diagnostic dialogues that are interested in objectively valid and testable
interpretations of life expressions of Others is the basic problem of an epistemology
of psychology and the social sciences.
The preceding investigations distinguished (Sect. 10.3) three types of psycho-
logical research. (1) Of interest on the animalic level are the reactions of Others as
animated living bodies to sensory stimulations and their system of animalic needs
406 11 Summary and Conclusions

and drives determining their reactions to such stimulations, including traumatic

situations. This is the level of experimental psychology, and this level admits
the application of the methods of experimental research. Different is that such
experiments are also able to use, in addition to intersensory observations of bodily
behavior, information that can be gained in linguistic communications between the
researchers and the objects of research about immediate sensory experiences of the
objects that are relevant in the context of the design of the experimental situations
(Sect. 10.3).
(2) The results of experimental psychology are presupposed in methods that
can be applied in social psychology, and the results of social psychology
are methodologically presupposed in individual psychology. Psychology as a
theory of subjective attitudes and reactions to social structures belonging to
the levels of secondary understanding of first-order elementary and higher
understanding presupposes psychological research in the region of secondary
understanding of first-order animalic understanding.
(3) Individual psychology is interested in the system of the first-order and second-
order elementary and higher understanding, the contents of this understanding,
and the desires, values, actions, and reactions of other persons and types of other
persons. Thus in the system of the human sciences of the first half of the last
century individual psychology was interpretative psychology par excellence,
and it still dominates the present everyday understanding of applied psychology
in clinical psychotherapy. Essential for epistemological reflections on a theoret-
ical psychological understanding and analysis of the lived experience of other
persons is, however, that such interpretations presuppose social psychology,
i.e., the understanding of the social environment of other persons, not only
now but also with regard to the past of their individual histories (Sect. 10.3).
A psychological analysis of individual history can transcend the realm of
conscious memories of past lived experiences and analyze those preconscious
and subconscious lived experiences in a distant past that are still able determine
present attitudes and the behavior of the objects of the analysis.
The central methodological and epistemological problems of diagnostic dia-
logues emerge on the level of social psychology. The context of dialogical situations
is itself a context of social interactions. The analysis of the formal ontological
structures of social interactions (Sect. 10.2) indicated that psychological research
in these contexts is first of all interested in subjective reactions to the systems of
social interactions of the subjects’s social environment. Seen from a formal point
of view, individual persons are parts of wholes of systems of social interactions.
They are independent parts because they can be parts of different wholes of social
interactions.
What is of interest in social psychology is the interpretation of life expressions of
types of individuals or groups of individuals that provide access to their first-order
understanding of their social environment in elementary and higher understanding.
Meaningful questions in such diagnostic dialogues presuppose, however, knowledge
of the types of the structures of the social context on the side of the interrogator. It is,
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks 407

therefore, necessary for keeping the required distance of disinterested interpretations

that precisely this knowledge must remain in brackets in such questions (Sect. 10.3).
More can only be said below because social psychology presupposes the results
of research in the social sciences, and this research presupposes methodological
criteria that cannot be reduced to techniques of diagnostic interrogations. They can
only be determined in the analysis of the methodological principles of the social
sciences.
Research in the social sciences has to begin with the “construction” of ideal
types of the basic structures of social interactions and systems of social interactions
(Sect. 10.4). The constitution of such ideal types presupposes empirically pre-
determined variations and in addition variations in imagination under the guidance
of the formal ontological principles of the theory of the whole and the parts
(Sects. 2.2 and 2.3). The pre-given material for such analyses of complex material
structures of wholes of a higher order are descriptions based not only on presently
available observations, but also on the results of research in social history, first of all
in contemporary social history (Sect. 10.4).
Essential for the analysis of ideal types in the social sciences is the description
of the system of purposes of social interactions. They determine the selection of
the means, i.e., the efficient causes in the process of the realization of the purposes
as final causes. Genuine historical causal explanations presuppose interpretations of
systems of customary and legal norms and values that determine the purposes and
the selections of means in social interactions (Sects. 6.2 and 6.3).
Ideal types can serve as schemata for final and efficient causal relations, and this
implies that they can be applied in genuine causal explanations in social history. The
social sciences are, however, first of all interested in the development of systems of
social interactions in the present and its future horizon, i.e., they are interested in
predictions. Predictions in the present about future steps in the process of social
interactions are possible because the first-order understanding of the participants
in certain types of social interaction already implies expectations and predictions.
To the degree to which they have an explicit knowledge about the efficiency of the
applied means, their behavior can be characterized as behavior of a rational ideal
type and this explicit knowledge even includes mathematical calculations especially
in the specific case of economic interactions (Sect. 10.4).
Furthermore, this first-order understanding includes also expectations of possible
external disturbances of the interactions caused by factors in the social and/or
natural environment as well as internal disturbances of certain types of interac-
tions caused by destructive behavior of participants in the interaction. Of crucial
significance for viable estimates about future effects of such internal factors can
be interpretations of complex and even incompatible systems of different purposes
of different groups of participants in complex systems of social interactions. The
presupposition of the possibility of predictions derived from ideal types in the
social sciences and its epistemological justification is, hence, that the material
for the construction of ideal types is pre-given in interpretations of the first-order
understanding of the social interactions of participants in the interaction.
408 11 Summary and Conclusions

Social sciences are empirical sciences and it is, therefore, necessary to test the
adequacy of the presupposed interpretations, and then of the predictions that can
be derived from the ideal types. Interviewing the participants in a system of social
interactions about their own first-order understanding of their social interactions
in diagnostic dialogues can be used as a test of the adequacy of an interpretation.
Such diagnostic dialogues are supposed to be the warrants of the distance that is
required for disinterested and objectively valid observations and interpretations.
Tests for adequacy presuppose the techniques of social psychology. The methods
of social psychology are, therefore, necessary implements of the methods of testing
interpretations in the social sciences.
Applications of these methods have to face the basic problem of the methods of
diagnostic dialogues. The problem is that the “objects” in these dialogues are the
“subjects” of their own first-order understanding and are, therefore, able to develop
an interest in the interpretations and the ideal type that serves as the model of the
interpretation of their social activities for their interrogators. If this happens, the
diagnostic dialogue is at an end, and the “objects” and the researcher will be either
involved in a productive dialogue in the search for truth, or in attempts on the part of
the “objects” to use the interpretation in ways that might serve their special interests
in reaching the goals of their social interactions.
Since ideal types admit deriving predictions about future developments in social
systems of interactions from ideal types in general (and especially from rational
ideal types) it is tempting to assume that the testing of predictions derived from
ideal types plus the knowledge of possibly interfering external and internal factors
can be used as a way out of problems connected with testing the adequacy of ideal
types in diagnostic dialogues. This assumption implies that social research is able to
apply the methods of testing predictions of the natural sciences. But this assumption,
together with other assumptions about the adequacy of hypotheses in the social
sciences that have been mentioned at the end of Sect. 10.4, has to cope with further
epistemological difficulties
(1) It is a minor epistemological problem for this assumption (Sects. 10.3 and 10.4)
that the degree of complexity of factors in initial conditions and effects in causal
relations in the systematic human sciences in general and especially in the social
sciences, is much higher than in the life sciences (Sect. 8.5).
(2) It is also a minor problem that the “evolution” of structures of social interactions
is much faster than even the evolution of the species in the life sciences.
Of crucial significance for (2) is that even changes on the lowest level of
the development of techniques and technologies for purposes of practical
social interactions are already the results of inventions. It is characteristic
for inventions that they cannot be known in advance. Such unforeseeable
innovations also determine the development of civil social interactions and
systems of higher understanding. Behind all inventions are authors and actors.
Being presently interested in present developments of social life implies the
possibility of being confronted with creative activities changing the systems of
social interactions.
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks 409

(3) The degree of precision of methodologies of the special disciplines of the

social sciences depends on the character of the purposes that determine social
interactions. Some of them require rational behavior presupposing explicit
knowledge of the causal efficiency of the means that are necessary. Some
require first of all aesthetic taste, some of them divine revelations, and some
of them, first of all jurisprudence, require prudence, etc. The methodological
problem of (3) is, hence, that the degree to which predictions can be derived
from interpretations of an ideal type of social interactions depends on the
degree to which rational behavior is required in systems of social interactions.
Otherwise research is restricted to more or less pure descriptive accounts of
developments in, e.g., the sociology of religious institutions, of the family,
etc. Research in these fields presupposes material that can only be taken from
research in history in general, first of all from contemporary history, and then
also from ethnographical research.
(4) An essential implication for epistemological reflection on the social sciences is
that the theories, and even their not yet tested and already tested predictions,
are themselves “inventions” and therefore factors that are themselves able to
cause unforeseen changes in social structures if they are “published” and if these
publications are known to the objects of the published research of their social
interactions. The objects of the interpretations that are constitutive for the ideal
type and the derivation of the predictions are the subjects of their interpreted
first order understanding of their own social interactions and are interested in
the future realization of their purposes in their interactions.
Participants in the social interaction in question can discover that the prediction is
of vital significance for the realization of their purposes, and whenever possible they
will try to eliminate the factors in their activities that are responsible for a predicted
harmful effect or to introduce factors that support the realization of their goals.
The disinterested researchers who published their findings in the social sciences
are at this very moment not disinterested observers but involved advisors, and in
such situations the results of their research are immediately relevant factors for the
development of the systems of social interactions that have been the objects of the
research.
(5) In their analyses of factors in the initial conditions and of the effects of causal
connections predictions in the systematic social sciences presuppose ideal
types. As mentioned above, the constructions of the ideal types presupposes
interpretations, and the tests of the adequacy of the ideal types presuppose
communications in diagnostic dialogues. The difficulties of the application of
the methodological principles of confirmations/disconfirmations of hypotheses
about interpretations are in turn relevant for confirmations of hypotheses about
causal connections because they are implicitly presupposed in the descriptions
of the relevant factors in causal hypotheses.
(6) The epistemological difficulties (1–4) increase if the research interest of the
social sciences is restricted not to parts of a system of social interactions in
general, but to an ideal type of a system of social interactions that is immediately
410 11 Summary and Conclusions

of significance for the whole society. The “higher” social sciences, economics,
the science of the law, and political science are such social sciences. All of
them have their generative foundations in practical professions that required
a background in theoretical reflections long before sociology was recognized
as an empirical science in the second half of the Nineteenth century. Nobody
expects that theoretical reflections on activities in these professions can be
separated as pure “disinterested research.” The majority of law students do not
want to become scientists; their goals are professional activities as lawyers or
judges.
The difficulties (4–6) have common roots in the temporal and spatial structures
of intersubjective communications in social interactions. A short recapitulation of
the basic presuppositions for possible disinterested research in the natural and the
historical human sciences can prepare this analysis. “Disinterested research” in
the empirical sciences is quite interested in confirmed knowledge in the region
of objects of this type of research. “Disinterested” means to be disinterested in
activities that can cause changes in the course of events in the region of these objects.
Results of research in the natural sciences can be applied in technologies (Sect. 9.2),
but neither the methodology nor the theories of the natural sciences as empirical
theoretical sciences are determined by an immediate interest in such applications.
The basic presupposition for “disinterested research” in the natural sciences
is a methodological abstraction that is constitutive for the objective validity of
research. This methodological abstraction brackets all contents that imply an
interest in purposes and values governing social interactions in the encounter
with the natural environment in the lifeworld. But this implies that all practical
purposes and, hence, interests in changing the course of natural events are also in
brackets. The contents of the empirical basis for the confirmation/disconfirmation
of hypothetically assumed universal causal conditionals in the natural sciences are,
therefore, restricted to intersensory observations. The discovered causal “universal
laws” presuppose mathematically explicable continua of space and time dimensions
that determine the “world” of the region of objects of the hard natural sciences
beyond the spatial and temporal structures of events, and the causal connections
between events in the lifeworld.
The interpretations and reconstructions of life expressions in the philological-
historical sciences are able to satisfy the requirements of “disinterested research”
for their methods of testing hypothetical interpretations. They can satisfy these
requirements because the methodological abstraction that is implied in the first
canon brackets the cultural context of philological and historical research in
the present, and with it the purposes and values that govern systems of social
interactions in the present. It is again an abstractive reduction that is constitutive for
the distance between the subjects of research and their objects. Of interest as objects
of “disinterested research” are only the purposes and values of interactions, and in
general the first-order higher and elementary understanding of and in the concrete
lifeworld of authors of fixed life expressions in a distant past. To be disinterested
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks 411

means to be value-free, i.e., free from a discussion of the values and purposes of
interactions in the past from the viewpoint of the values and purposes of the present
situation of the researchers.
The basic epistemological problem for the systematic human sciences is that
this distance between the present and past historical reality shrinks in contemporary
history and reaches the zero limit for the interest in the future development of social
structures given in the actual present in the social sciences. The type of distance that
is left for possible “value-free” objectively valid research in the systematic human
sciences is the distance between a disinterested observer and interpreter of Others
in the space of systems of social interactions in the present lifeworld. The objects
of research are Others who are participants in social interactions and their first-
order understanding of the social interactions. But these “objects” are themselves
other subjects who can participate in communications and interactions with the
subjects carrying out the research. As such they are potential partners in dialogues
in the present. In contrast, the predecessors who are the authors of the presently
available fixed life expressions, i.e., the immediate objects of historical research,
cannot appear as partners in dialogues in the present.
Research in the systematic human sciences, i.e., psychology and the social
sciences, is first of all theoretically “interested” in events in the present. Social
psychology and by implication individual psychology implicitly presuppose inter-
pretations of social interactions. Vice versa the social sciences presuppose methods
of social psychology in tests that serve the confirmation or disconfirmation of their
interpretations of social interactions. The problems (4–6) for psychology and the
social sciences have, therefore, the same common roots.
The first aspect of this problem is that the construction of ideal types that are
presupposed in possible explanations, predictions, and the testing of predictions
already presuppose interpretations of life expressions of participants in social
interactions in present communication. The elimination of misunderstanding and
not-understanding in the medium of communications in a pre-scientific lifeworld
presupposes productive dialogues on the level of elementary and higher under-
standing. The communication between the researchers and their objects who are
themselves subjects in the systematic human sciences requires a distance between
the researchers and their object/subjects. There is no such distance in productive
dialogues.
The basic methodological assumption of the systematic human science is, hence,
that diagnostic dialogues and diagnostic interpretations are able to serve as warrants
for the required distance between the research and the objects of research and,
therefore, also as the warrant for disinterested research. The ideal model for such
dialogues is the “communication” between psychologists and clients on the level of
individual psychology. Presupposed on the side of the psychologist are, however,
always more or less reliable interpretations of the systems of social interactions of
the “objects” of the psychologists in the social sciences.
The epistemological root problem for this methodological assumption of the sys-
tematic human sciences surfaces in the social sciences. Researchers in these contexts
412 11 Summary and Conclusions

can be disinterested interpreters/observers only if they themselves are not involved

in the observed/interpreted system of social interactions. The presuppositions of
this type of “distance” are that the system of social interactions considered is a
comparatively small dependent or independent part of the whole of a larger context
of interactions and that the required distance between the context of disinterested
research and the context of the objects of the research is a distance in the “space” of
the larger whole of the system of social interactions.
The distance breaks down (1) if the “objects” in diagnostic dialogues challenge
the implicit assumptions about what is really relevant and really the case that are
implied in the questions of the interrogator. This challenging implies the demand
to recognize the “objects” as “subjects,” i.e., as partners in a productive dialogue.
The distance breaks down (2) if the “objects” of the theories of the researchers
(2.a) reject or (2.b) accept the theories as a correct interpretation of the ideal type
of their own social situation. The outcome of (2.a) will again be as in case (1) the
request to discuss the theory in a productive dialogue. The problem of (2.b) is that
in this case the theory itself will be a factor that determines the social behavior of
the participants in the system of social interactions because the predictions that can
be derived are themselves causal factors that are immediately of significance for the
possible realization of their purposes.
As professionals, psychologists and social scientists are usually interested in the
recognition of their theories in the social community in general and especially by the
“objects” of their research, i.e., they are interested in their recognition as advisors.
They are in this sense always interested and involved partners in social interactions
and productive dialogues because they have to explain to their clients/partners that
the application of the advice that can be derived from their theories can serve as
efficient means for the realization of the purposes of their interactions. They can
maintain the cognitive attitude of uninvolved, disinterested researchers only as long
as and to the extent to which the system of interactions under investigation is a
partial system in the context of a larger whole of such systems in which researchers
can locate their own place as researchers and not yet as advisors in the process of
other partial systems of this whole.
There are, however, systems of social interactions that ultimately imply purposes
that are of significance for the whole system of social interactions. The reasons that
determine the choice of values that are constitutive for such purposes are, therefore,
of significance for all members of the society, including the social scientists, and
among them first of all the political scientists and their research activities. In this
situation empirical research has lost the ability to separate itself from its object.
The dimension of lawgiving, and with it reflections on positive laws and justice in
political science, transcends the limits of an empirical science that is able to bracket
all reflections on values, purposes, and normative principles. The model of civil
social interactions in a court of law already indicates the limits of the application of
the general methodological requirements for empirical sciences to jurisprudence.
Jurisprudence demands that a court of law has to apply both the methodology
of the interpretation of texts as a methodology of an empirical science and the
methodology of history in the reconstruction of “what was really the case” in the
11.3 The System of the Empirical Sciences: Concluding Remarks 413

immediate past horizon of the present. The methods that can be applied include not
only the interpretation of the testimonies of witnesses, but also knowledge about
evidence that can be derived from the natural sciences and used for the purposes of
the reconstruction (Sects. 10.6 and 10.7).
The final step, the application of the law to the case and the implied demand
to enforce the law, immediately implies a chain of inseparable interested and
involved “professional” social interactions that are required by the law itself. This
“application” is in itself an “ought” determined by the law itself. For cases that
have no precedent cases this “ought” requires creative and innovative actions
and interactions in the court of law. Such cases mark the borderline between
jurisprudence in the narrower sense and the political task of lawgiving. In the
ideal case, of course, the prudence of the lawgiver in lawgiving demands that all
relevant knowledge that can be obtained from the results of the empirical sciences
ought to be taken into account in the act of lawgiving. The act of lawgiving itself
is, however, a creative act of the lawgiver that is guided by purposes and values.
Phenomenological reflections on social interactions in political science connected
with lawgiving presuppose but also transcend not only the region of the empirical
sciences, but also of the task of a phenomenological epistemology.
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Wiegand, O. 2000. Phenomenological-semantic investigations into incompleteness. In Wiegand
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Wiegand, O. 2001. The phenomenological semantics of natural language. The New Yearbook for
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Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Name Index

A E
Argand, 203 Ephoros, 66
Aristotle, 65, 66, 169, 184, 210, 214, 241, 273
Averroist, 215
F
Fichte, J.G., 43, 307, 318, 388
B Fink, E., 43, 387–389
Betti, E., 103, 111–115, 118, 120 Freiburg circle, 34, 36, 45, 387
Birt, 113, 118–120 Freud, S., 304
Blass, 110, 113, 118–120
Boeckh, A., 69, 103–105, 110, 111, 113,
118–121, 320, 323 G
Bohm, 225, 227–229, 234 Gadamer, H.-G., 55, 56, 68, 69, 82, 92, 113,
Bolzano, B., 308, 318 120, 121, 150, 151, 154, 353
Brentano, F., 13 Galileo, G., 162, 170, 183, 197, 198, 212,
218–220, 223, 275, 381
Goedel, 17
C Gurwitsch, A., 26, 34, 47, 50, 52, 80, 86, 169,
Cairns, D., 45, 47, 86, 387, 388 287, 300, 388
Comte, A., 70

H
D Hegel, G.W.F., 43, 88, 93, 384, 387
Darwin, Ch., 252, 259, 400 Heidegger, M., 5, 92, 104, 121, 125, 169, 384,
Descartes, R., 2, 3, 31, 162, 170, 175, 184, 198, 387
203, 213, 396 Heisenberg, 228
Dilthey, W., 4, 12, 49, 55, 69–74, 79–85, 93, Hempel, C.G., 131
94, 96, 103, 104, 110, 121, 125, 128, Herschel, W.F., 91, 110, 176
153, 162, 168, 277–280, 292, 303, 306, Hilbert, D., 17, 169, 171, 185, 195, 199,
346–348, 379, 384 203–207, 211, 233
Diodoros, 66 Hirsch, E.D., 113, 120
Droysen, J.G., 69, 110, 113, 119, 120, 140, Hopkins, B., 17, 34, 93, 187, 190, 195, 200,
141, 143, 144 206, 209

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 423

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8
424 Name Index

Hume, D., 2, 42, 110, 161, 176, 199 New School (New York) tradition, 26, 45, 387,
Husserl, E., 4–7, 13–15, 17–20, 23, 26, 31–36, 388, 391
42, 43, 45, 47, 49, 55, 74, 75, 79, 80,
85, 87, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 122, 125,
169–171, 185, 187–189, 195, 196, 200, P
204, 206–209, 257, 277, 279–282, 287, Plato, 65, 66, 104, 208, 210, 358
292, 293, 307–309, 311, 320, 383–391, Popper, K., 131, 139, 161, 163, 169, 176, 179,
396, 400 384

K
Kant, 3, 14, 26, 30, 31, 42, 43, 110, 162, 186, Q
239, 241, 347, 348, 353, 396, 400 Quine, W.v.O., 31, 163, 164, 180
Klein, J., 17, 195, 200, 206, 209
Kronecker, L., 190, 203

R
L Reinach, A., 347
Laplace, P-S., 221 Rickert, H., 70–75, 79–85, 93, 96, 168, 279,
Lavoisier, A., 240 280, 292, 379
Livius, T., 66 Riemann, B., 185, 201, 202, 212, 223, 231, 223
Locke, J., 3, 42, 110, 176 Russel, B., 185
Lorentz, H., 212, 223

M S
Maitland, W.F., 148, 149 Schleiermacher, F., 68, 103, 104, 105,
Mill, J.S., 2, 11, 42, 70, 71, 74, 91, 110, 139, 110–113, 115, 120, 125, 320
162, 176, 240, 244, 247, 250, 251, Schutz, A., 5, 7, 23, 26, 33, 34, 50, 52, 53, 71,
318, 396 72, 79–88, 94, 278–282, 286, 287, 289,
292, 306–312, 314, 315, 318–321, 324,
N 344, 347, 360, 361, 386–388, 390
Neo-Kantianism, 14, 161, 169 Stumpf, C., 11–15, 206, 277
Subject Index

A 296, 299–301, 309, 310, 312–314,

Abacus, 184, 192, 193, 195 316–321, 323, 325, 326, 330, 332,
Absence, 52, 53 341, 348–350, 360, 362, 364, 371,
Abstraction 380, 393, 404, 406, 413
formalizing, 5, 17, 20, 27, 30, 32, 90, non-local, 227
185, 198, 200–202, 205, 206, Activity
208, 220, 224, 230, 231, 237–239, intentional, 39, 41, 47, 48, 191, 299
398 in passivity, 46
generalizing, 27, 32, 33, 52, 174, 199, 206, primordial, 46, 47
214, 244, 245, 269, 270, 300, 303, synthetical, 38
308 transcendental, 35
idealizing, 179, 188, 193, 199, 216, 217, Addressees, 112
219, 230, 232, 311 contemporary, 112
isolating, 18, 28, 32 Adequacy
methodological, 7, 51, 89–91, 93–95, empirical, 167
116, 117, 129, 151–153, 170, 172, postulate of, 79, 289, 319–321, 323–325,
181, 210, 225, 240, 262, 270, 284, 328
292–294, 326, 327, 372, 375, 380, Algebra
393, 394, 396–398, 401, 402, 404, higher, 4, 185, 186, 199–201, 231, 287
405, 410 lower, 185, 186, 200
reductive, 6, 7, 170, 215, 240, 397 Algorithm, 167
Acceleration, 171, 216, 219, 220, 224, 235, Algorithmecist, 184
266, 271 Alter ego, 37
Act Analysis
intentional, 2, 3, 13, 15, 16, 24, 27, 29, 30, descriptive, 50, 52, 162, 165, 247
33, 35, 36, 38–41, 47, 48, 85, 88, phenomenological, 3, 18, 20, 23, 26, 30,
111, 187, 189, 191, 205, 260, 285, 34, 37, 53, 79, 86, 89, 126, 164,
297, 299, 311, 335, 386, 389 166, 169, 172, 174, 176, 179, 180,
unity of, 35 186–188, 196, 201, 203, 206, 212,
Action, 2, 41, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 61–64, 214, 222, 240, 247, 267, 273, 282,
75, 78, 81, 88, 95, 101, 106, 107, 289, 292, 307, 321, 325, 330, 354,
125, 136, 139, 141–144, 146, 150, 356, 379, 389, 391, 392
154, 155, 172, 173, 175, 192, Analytical philosophy (analyst), 73
194, 210, 221, 227, 268, 269, 278, Anatomy, 245, 251, 259, 304
281, 286, 288, 289, 291, 293, 294, Annals, 101, 107, 127, 128

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 425

T.M. Seebohm, History as a Science and the System of the Sciences,
Contributions to Phenomenology 77, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-13587-8
426 Subject Index

Anthropology, 23, 82, 140, 317 281, 288, 293, 297–299, 310, 321,
cultural, 23, 82 327, 334, 355, 359, 394, 398, 405,
Antiquity, classical, 13, 65–69, 74, 102, 412
104–106, 115, 116, 120, 121, 126, natural, 15, 26, 36, 42, 49, 93, 287
151, 184, 201, 346, 358, 366, 383, phenomenological, 4, 14, 15, 34–36, 41,
395 86, 87, 166, 287
Apodicticity, 35, 36, 38, 39 Author
presumptive, 35, 36 banishment of, 113, 120, 123, 151
Apophantics, 3, 4, 16, 17, 203, 204, 245 intention of, 112, 113, 120, 356
formal, 3, 4, 17, 204 Authority, 55, 116, 164, 331, 361, 362,
A posteriori, 32, 346 372
Appearance, 11, 75, 170, 221, 222, 224, 234, Authorization/authorized, 57, 58, 67, 350
235, 249, 381, 382 Axiom, 17, 19, 89, 184–187, 197, 199, 200,
Apperception, 15, 30, 35, 43, 161, 164 203–207, 211, 222, 231, 233
unity of transcendental, 15, 43, 161 Axiomatic system, 91, 179, 184, 187, 188, 201,
Application, 1, 12, 55, 66, 104, 132, 163, 204
183–212, 257, 279, 384
Appresentation, 37, 47, 48
associative, 37 B
A priori, 14, 26, 30–32, 43, 88, 137, 161, Barter, 331, 333, 335, 336
164, 179, 216, 226, 239, 243, 265, Beginning, absolute, 225
286, 292, 297, 309, 320, 346, 351, Behavior
358–360, 391 economic, 341, 345
Archaeology rational, 313, 317, 318, 324, 328, 331, 338,
classical, 67 345, 409
historical, 105, 106, 109, 110, 123, 156 Being
methods, methodology of, 105 apodictic, 39, 42
Architecture, 67, 81, 105, 107, 260, 261, contingent, 36, 38, 39
394 necessary, 36, 38, 39, 42
Arithmetic, 78, 178, 184, 185, 188, 189, objective, 39, 384
195–197, 199, 200, 204, 209, 217, subjective, 36, 38, 39
218, 231, 334, 343, 394 Big bang, 225, 258
Art, 6, 11, 19, 31, 58, 63, 66, 67, 70–72, 74, Biography, 101, 113, 115, 119–121, 123, 151,
79, 81, 88, 92, 102, 105–107, 109, 152, 304
119, 140, 144, 147, 169, 174, 184, Biology, 12, 72, 161
194, 196, 197, 214, 225, 235, 236, Body
241, 257, 260, 261, 267, 270, 303, animate, 297, 335, 361, 389
305, 317, 323, 324, 344, 357–359, celestial, 128, 153, 173, 175, 214, 219, 221,
383, 395, 399, 400 258, 264, 268
liberal, 72 inanimate, 47, 389
Artes librales, 184 living body, 37, 40, 47, 48, 89, 179, 198,
Artifact, 50, 51, 61, 62, 81, 102, 106, 109, 110, 217, 220, 298, 305, 387, 404
118, 123, 124, 129, 156, 180, 191, other living body, 37, 40, 47, 48, 198,
192, 194, 214, 250, 257, 260, 261, 217
263, 264, 268, 270, 315–317, 323, primordial self-giveness of the, 38, 46
330, 331, 338, 362 Bohm interpretation, 225, 227, 229, 234
Association, 3, 23, 24, 30, 32, 270, 303, 306 Bricolage, 316, 317, 323
Astronomy, astronomical, 161, 176, 183, 184, Byzantium, Byzantine empire, 59, 65–67
225, 258, 264, 395
Atom, 136, 195, 215, 240, 249, 258, 394
Attitude C
cognitive, 6, 111, 112, 116, 174, 175, Calculus, 171, 184, 197, 198, 201, 202, 212,
185–187, 210, 217, 242, 243, 247, 230, 231, 271, 330, 397
254, 263, 266, 268–270, 272–275, infinitesimal, 171, 197, 201, 230, 231, 271
Subject Index 427

Canon, 2, 19, 103–105, 110–129, 150–153, Cognition, 2, 16, 28–30, 41

156, 262, 284, 291, 294, 326, theory of, 2
353, 354, 356, 402, 410. See also Collection, 5, 17, 20–23, 25, 31, 32, 58, 65,
Hermeneutics 66, 89, 108, 165, 179, 188–193, 195,
of the whole and the parts, 103, 104, 121, 196, 208–210, 243, 244, 251, 300,
402 301, 303, 306, 335, 369
Capital, 340, 341 Colligation, 28
Case, what is the case, 155, 351, 356 Command, 51, 57, 61, 62, 136, 137, 318, 349,
precedent, 348, 356, 357, 413 358, 361, 362, 372–304
Category Commodity(ies), 333, 336–338
epistemological, 72, 73, 76 Common sense, 274, 275, 320
logical, 175, 241 Community, 3, 4, 38, 40–42, 45, 47, 48,
material, 361 51, 53–55, 61, 88, 90, 108, 126,
ontological, 208, 288, 399, 400 173, 267, 270, 271, 279, 295, 297,
formal, 5, 28, 175, 208 331–334, 336, 349, 358, 362, 363,
Causality/causal 366, 367, 369–371, 375, 412
efficient, 75, 171, 221, 240, 241, 247, intersubjective, 3, 38, 40–42, 47, 54, 55,
266, 273, 288, 293, 317, 323, 173, 271, 279
372 Concept, 27, 29–33, 49, 75, 141, 147, 166,
mathematical idealization of, 74 168, 169, 171, 175, 195, 199, 209,
statistical, 73, 163, 177, 225, 247, 216, 231, 245, 247, 269, 302, 308,
280 309, 315, 330, 359
Causation Conceptualization, 29, 31–33, 287, 309, 327
local, 224 Condition
non-local, 224 causal, 91, 141–143, 149, 156, 176, 282,
Cause 301, 312, 322, 369, 371, 373, 410
efficient, 140, 141, 214, 241, 248, 250, 271, circumstantial, 136, 139, 143, 146, 149,
288, 291, 312–314, 345, 381, 399, 154, 155, 333, 396
407 contingent, 166
final, 77, 172, 174, 214, 215, 220, 241, formal, 140
246, 247, 250, 254, 288–292, 299, initial, 60, 96, 136, 139, 142, 163, 176, 177,
312–314, 317, 368, 371, 392–394, 229, 244, 249, 268, 280, 293, 300,
399, 404, 407 301, 325, 328, 333, 342, 367, 391,
formal, 23, 214, 215, 241, 248–250, 254, 404, 405, 408, 409
270, 271, 399–401, 404 logical, 135, 139
material, 62, 214, 241 material, 61, 140, 375
necessary, 139 necessary, 25, 34, 35, 58, 128, 139, 142,
sufficient, 139 166, 177, 213, 233, 241, 251, 266
Change sufficient, 25, 139, 396
irregular, 221 Conditional
regular, 60–63, 172, 173, 181 counterfactual, 136
social, 53, 333 deontological, 132
Chemistry, 4, 7, 12, 72, 75, 161, 183, 240, 247, exact, 132
248, 259, 346, 399 generalized, 25, 133, 135–139, 141–150,
Chronicle, 66, 127, 128, 153, 154 154, 282, 294, 368, 369, 371, 396
Circle, 34, 36, 45, 103, 104, 121, 151, 197, 268, implicative, 25, 134, 135, 176
387, 388. See also Hermeneutics replicative, 25, 134, 135, 137–139, 142,
of the whole and the parts, 103, 104 143
Clan, 280, 302, 331, 362, 367 universal (universalized), 91, 162
Cogitation, 2, 33, 386, 388 Confirmation/disconfirmation, 64, 81, 90, 108,
Cogitative types, 48, 89, 166, 169, 175, 176, 111, 279, 290, 292, 310, 319, 320,
178, 187, 190, 217, 245, 292, 293, 323, 325, 354, 371, 373, 398, 403,
326, 328, 335, 383, 391, 392 405, 409–411
Cogitatum, 3, 35, 312 Conjunction, 27, 133, 226
428 Subject Index

Consciousness Counterfactual, 132, 136, 137

hermeneutical, 68 Crisis of a tradition, 59
historical, 68 Criterion, epistemological, 73
individual, 46 Criticism, 2, 102–104, 122, 195, 206, 238
primordial, 46 literary, 2, 102–104
subjective, 15, 23, 33, 36–42, 191 Critique
Consociate, 48, 51–53, 55, 56, 61, 78, 84, 115, of the Enlightenment, 68
147, 198, 268, 284, 291, 294, 304, generic, 103, 121
305, 310, 318, 319, 361, 401 grammatical, 69
Constitution higher, 69
active, 23, 55 historical, 107, 125, 133, 135, 144–150
generative, 23, 48, 55 individual, 120
genetic, 23, 55, 87, 387, 389 intersubjective, 41, 42
intentional, 37 lower, 11, 69
intersubjective, 23, 48, 55, 179 philological historical, 68, 120
passive, 23, 392 Custom, 51, 58, 60, 61, 76, 79, 125, 142, 147,
primordial, 55 150, 274, 316, 331, 350, 358, 362,
static, 23, 48, 55, 87 364
subjective, 48, 55
Construct, 13, 43, 89, 96, 134, 272, 281, 289,
290, 309, 314, 315, 320 D
Construction Darwinism, 251–253, 364
dialectical, 42 historical, 251–253
historical, 401 Decay, 173, 245, 248, 259, 268
hypothetical, 15, 43, 186 Decision, authorized, 57, 58
metaphysical, 42 Decision procedure, 2, 90
Consumer, 323, 331, 333, 336–339 Deconstruction, 92, 348, 396
Contact, epistemological, 268 Deduction, 11, 16, 19, 42, 43, 132, 133,
Contemplation, 77, 88, 174, 384, 390, 394 135, 137, 184, 186, 204, 266, 318,
metaphysical, 77, 390 347
Contemplative, 5, 51, 174, 175, 181, 273, 352, natural, 19
374 Degeneration, 214
Contemporary, 53, 54, 56, 82, 84, 95, 96, 101, Description/descriptive
106, 107, 109, 112, 153, 156, 283, of observations, 11, 13, 299
284, 288, 289, 291, 292, 296, 311, verbal, 11, 244
354, 355, 357, 360, 364, 366, 367, Design, intelligent, 172, 254, 404
371, 372, 374, 375, 396, 405, 407, Determination, 6, 81, 89, 91, 95, 96, 102, 112,
409, 411 141, 162, 192, 217, 242, 244, 252,
Continuum 259, 261, 264, 265, 282, 317, 319,
four dimensional, 223, 224 344, 371, 402, 403
n-dimensional, 202, 211 Dialectic(al)
three dimensional, 223 phenomenological, 42, 43
Contradiction, 15, 27, 67, 204, 239 Dialogue
Contrast, 3, 19–21, 28, 37, 46, 47, 81, 88, 120, diagnostic, 96, 303, 325, 405, 406, 408,
181, 182, 185, 193, 194, 227, 257, 409, 411, 412
262, 273, 282, 286, 307, 313, 325, productive, 325, 405, 408, 411, 412
373, 395, 398, 411 Disappointment, 60, 63, 147, 288, 318, 321,
Conventionalism, 163 392
Coordinate(s), 153, 197, 198, 202, 212, 218, Discipline
219, 223, 402 empirical, 40, 41
Copenhagen interpretation, 225, 228, 229, 234 humanistic, 69, 77, 78, 91, 92, 101, 103,
Corruption, 69, 214, 240, 241, 249, 253, 258, 105, 107, 115, 116
268 material eidetic, 16
Subject Index 429

Discourse Empiricist, 12, 42, 176, 267

oral, 50, 56, 81, 107 Encounter, cultural, 84
written, 55, 56, 63, 81, 103 Energy, 171, 216, 219, 223, 224, 235, 239,
Distance, 53, 54, 56, 84, 91, 95, 105, 125, 381, 382
128, 152, 153, 156, 173, 178, 179, Engineering/engineer, 1, 212, 250, 301, 331,
192–194, 200, 217, 218, 220, 224, 339, 341
227, 232, 233, 264, 277, 280, 284, Enlightenment, 68, 69, 127, 370
294, 295, 306, 326, 353, 363, 371, Entity, theoretical, 1–3, 5, 49, 65, 81, 88, 89,
393, 402, 405, 407, 408, 410–412 91–93, 132, 148, 154, 165, 168, 169,
temporal, 178, 192, 264, 363 173–175, 177, 183–185, 200, 201,
Distribution 210, 213, 214, 217, 218, 222, 229,
of goods, 330, 331, 334, 363 230, 237, 239, 244, 249, 254, 258,
of power, 164, 302, 334, 342, 344, 345, 266, 267, 269–272, 275, 277, 294,
358, 359, 363, 364, 367, 369, 370 295, 298, 300, 303, 304, 306, 307,
of wealth, 342, 345, 370 310, 312, 318, 324, 326, 327, 333,
Distributive, 346 334, 336, 352, 354, 358, 373, 381,
382, 388, 394, 395, 397, 398, 410,
411
E Environment, 5, 41, 49–51, 56, 58, 59, 62,
Economics, 4, 60, 65, 70, 72, 73, 79–81, 83, 63, 75–78, 85, 93–96, 106, 107,
96, 109, 140–144, 148, 150, 155, 117, 124, 174–176, 180, 181,
157, 164, 182, 184, 192, 193, 211, 184, 185, 201, 210–212, 214, 219,
267, 271, 274, 277, 283, 288, 294, 230, 232, 241, 244, 245, 247,
302, 306, 307, 322, 325, 328–330, 248, 252, 253, 258, 259, 262–264,
332–335, 337–346, 348, 349, 352, 266–268, 270, 274, 280, 284–286,
358, 361, 362, 364–368, 370–375, 288, 291, 293, 296, 298–302, 311,
390, 391, 394, 397, 407, 410 313, 314, 316, 322, 324, 325,
Economy, 35, 80, 81, 140, 143, 274, 277, 317, 331, 332, 334, 340, 356, 365,
329–346, 363–365, 369, 370, 372, 367, 370, 392, 393, 395, 398, 406,
373 407, 410
political, 344 Environment, natural, 184, 185, 201,
Effect, causal, 313, 409 210–212, 214, 219, 230, 232,
Ego 233, 240, 241, 244, 252, 262–264,
absolute, 382, 386, 388, 389 266–268, 270, 274, 280, 284–286,
alter, 37 288, 291, 293, 296, 298–302, 311,
Cartesian, 4 313, 314, 316, 322, 324, 325,
cogito cogitatum, 3, 35 331, 332, 334, 340, 356, 365, 367,
pole 370, 392, 393, 395, 398, 406, 407,
primal, 42, 386 410
primordial, 37 Epistemic interpretation of. See Paradox,
transcendental, 386 reduction
Eidology, 13–15 Epistemology, 1–7, 11–16, 18–20, 22, 24, 26,
Eidos, eidetic, 3, 5, 13, 15, 16, 23, 25–33, 35, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40–43, 45–97,
90, 141, 142, 181, 245, 297, 309, 115, 137, 141, 154, 156, 161–183,
327, 385, 402 185, 187, 195, 203, 205, 207, 216,
Elements, table of:, 240 221, 222, 229, 235–238, 242, 244,
Elimination, 132, 226, 275, 282, 284, 287, 291, 252, 253, 257, 262, 264, 270, 275,
325, 349, 351, 366, 394, 405, 411 284, 292, 296, 301, 308, 313, 315,
universal, 132 318, 320, 327, 329, 341, 348, 359,
Empiricism, 2, 11, 13, 70, 142, 179, 206, 211, 360, 366, 367, 373, 379, 381–387,
267, 396 391, 392, 395, 398–400, 402, 405,
naturalistic, 13 413
430 Subject Index

Epistemology (cont.) 222, 224, 231–233, 235, 247, 268,

phenomenological, 1–7, 11–43, 45–97, 270–272, 291, 397
115, 141, 162, 169, 170, 174, 181, intersubjective, 24, 48, 63, 81, 172, 190,
183, 195, 203, 207, 216, 229, 235, 217, 218, 232
237, 238, 242, 244, 247, 252, 253, lived, 3, 7, 24, 41, 46–48, 60, 80, 116,
262, 270, 284, 292, 296, 301, 308, 128, 129, 152, 155, 169, 170, 172,
313, 315, 318, 327, 329, 348, 366, 174, 190, 200–202, 214, 215, 218,
367, 381, 384–387, 391, 392, 398, 220, 224, 232, 239, 281, 285–289,
400, 402, 413 296–298, 305, 311, 312, 343, 381,
Essence 382, 392, 397, 406
aristotelian, 23 objective, 24, 88, 89
exact, 3, 16, 18, 27–29, 74, 78, 178, 187, pre-predicative, 20, 30, 87
188, 193, 194, 199, 200, 208, 217, pre-scientific, 175, 232
381, 397 primordial, 6, 47, 217
formal, 3, 16, 17, 27, 30, 32, 41, 198, 206, primordial lived, 46
208, 209, 269, 327 self, 15, 46
formalized, 87 sensory, sensuous, 11, 13, 29, 30, 141, 162,
ideal, 188, 193, 201, 207 172, 179, 211, 216, 298
material, 13, 16–18, 25–27, 30, 32, 36, 41, solipsistic, 6, 169
87, 206, 269 subjective, 16, 24, 48
morphological, 27, 33, 188, 199, 206, 208, Experimental situation, 11, 139, 176, 177,
309 210, 211, 221, 222, 225, 226, 229,
Ethics, 14, 65, 79, 215, 269, 274 233–236, 238, 240, 244, 246, 247,
Ethnology, 23, 82, 106, 124, 140, 286 249, 251, 268, 280, 332, 406
Event, 14, 24, 25, 48, 54, 59, 61–63, 65, 66, Experiment, experimental research, 210
71, 74, 75, 81, 85, 91, 92, 95, 96, Explanation
101, 107, 108, 125–127, 129, 133, causal, 6, 11, 12, 60, 63, 71–73, 76, 81,
134, 136, 141–143, 146, 147, 153, 107, 121, 131–157, 161, 168, 244,
156, 167, 168, 171, 173, 175, 185, 247, 252, 257–262, 264, 271, 282,
190, 214, 218, 219, 221, 223, 228, 283, 286, 292, 301, 313, 314, 330,
229, 232, 233, 236, 252, 258–265, 332, 347, 364, 366, 381, 382, 393,
267, 268, 273, 274, 277, 279, 280, 407
282, 283, 287, 288, 290–292, 294, genetic, 131
300, 302, 303, 308, 313, 314, 321, genuine historical, 96, 136, 138, 261, 364,
322, 325, 328, 332, 344, 354, 364, 407
365, 368, 370, 371, 383, 402, 403, historical, 92, 96, 111, 131–138, 140–149,
410, 411 154, 156, 253, 261, 265, 283
Evidence Explanatory scheme, 92
apodictic, 39, 40 Expression
counter, 39, 227 animalic life, 47, 49
dubitable, 39 fixed life, 7, 48, 49, 54–57, 63, 68, 76, 78,
presumptive, 38, 39 80–84, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97, 101, 106,
Evolution, 58, 67, 75, 140, 163, 170, 172, 242, 109, 115, 116, 118, 121, 123, 125,
248–250, 252, 253, 258–260, 280, 126, 129, 144, 145, 151–153, 155,
282, 398–401, 404, 408 168, 257, 258, 260, 261, 263–265,
Expectation 283, 284, 291, 294, 310, 320, 321,
active, 24 324, 348, 355, 360, 363, 364, 371,
history of, 145 373, 396, 401–404, 410, 411
primordial, 24, 172, 392 immediate life, 49, 50, 56, 63, 78, 81, 83,
Experience 92, 107, 284, 310, 371, 404
everyday, 107, 131, 136, 138, 144–146, life, 7, 47–50, 55–57, 63, 68, 71, 76, 78,
253, 327 80–84, 90–92, 94, 95, 97, 101,
intersensory, 155, 172, 174, 175, 186, 105–107, 109, 115, 116, 118–126,
192, 194, 198, 199, 202, 216, 219, 129, 144, 145, 151, 152, 155, 168,
Subject Index 431

191, 257, 258, 260, 261, 263–265, classical, 213, 216, 224, 231
279, 282–284, 286, 289, 291, 293, formal properties of, 18, 21, 22
294, 298–300, 303, 305, 306, 310, generative, 23, 24, 45, 54, 55, 57–60,
311, 320, 323, 324, 348, 355, 360, 66, 76, 78, 84, 85, 89, 102, 126,
363, 371–374, 380, 381, 392, 396, 153, 166, 171, 172, 174, 178–180,
401–406, 410, 411 183, 185–187, 189, 190, 192, 194,
Extension 197–199, 203, 212–214, 216, 217,
spatial, 19, 28, 192, 193 224, 230, 235, 236, 266, 270, 288,
of terms, 28 292, 293, 310, 313, 316, 329, 334,
Extinction, 259 336, 339, 340, 350, 354, 358, 362,
390–396, 410
genetic, 23, 32, 39, 40, 46, 49, 53, 55, 60,
F 67, 87, 187, 242, 244, 399
Fact immediate, 49, 77, 181, 242
for the historian, 81, 124, 125, 140, in the lifeworld, 224
145–147, 152, 156, 253 mathematical, 224
historical, 107, 125, 126, 128, 133, 149, one-sided, 22, 25, 28, 46, 62, 63, 172, 248,
166, 181, 304, 380, 395 288, 326
Factor post-classical, 398
circumstantial, 141–1423 reciprocal, 40, 49, 56, 392
external, 59, 280, 313, 322, 343, 369, 370 systems of, 180
internal, 322–324, 326, 369, 370, 400, 407, temporal, 25
408 unifying, 19, 20
necessary, 143, 176 Freedom, transcendental, 221
Falsification, 70, 90, 102, 108, 123, 124, Function, 13, 16, 21, 22, 27, 35, 50, 56, 58,
145–150, 162–164, 177, 281, 355 115, 119, 134, 136, 185, 191, 202,
Falsificationusm 203, 211, 212, 219, 228, 231, 245,
dogmatic, 163, 358, 394 246, 248, 259, 260, 287, 307, 310,
methodological, 163 316–318, 321, 324, 336, 337, 350,
naïve, 162, 163, 177 363, 367, 374, 400
sophisticated, 163 Fusion, 46
Family, 19, 21, 22, 140, 243, 302, 304, 322,
331, 362, 367, 409
Fashion, 51 G
Force Galilean frame(work), 154, 258, 259, 261, 264,
bodily, 373 280
creative, 253 Gavagai, 180
at a distance, 173, 220, 227 Gene, 253
local, 220, 224 Genetic code, 249, 250, 253, 400, 401, 403,
moving, 61, 253 404
non-local, 220, 224 Genre, 65, 66, 78, 82, 93, 101–104, 107–109,
Form, 6, 16, 17, 29, 117, 127, 132–134, 119, 121–123, 126, 133, 179, 184,
137, 161, 171, 190, 191, 195, 203, 323, 350, 352, 356, 403
214–216, 226, 239, 241, 249, 251, literary, 65, 66, 78, 103, 104, 107, 108, 126,
253, 254, 259, 260, 268, 271, 272, 133, 179, 403
309, 317, 334, 358, 370, 398–401 Geometry
Formalism, 5, 17, 164, 166–169, 171, 177, analytical, 201
178, 183–213, 217, 219, 222–240, Euclidean, 184, 188, 193, 194, 196,
243, 251, 267, 275, 276, 382 198–202, 204, 224, 230, 231
Fossil, 252, 258–260, 398, 400, 401, non-Euclidean, 185, 186, 231
404 synthetic, 199
Foundation Gestalt, 31, 272, 300, 398, 401
categorical structure of, 20 qualities, 300
432 Subject Index

Goal, 1, 41, 49–51, 62, 66, 71, 72, 75, 78, 88, as a science, 93, 95, 96, 101–129, 145, 153,
89, 91, 92, 94, 105, 108, 141, 155, 154, 165, 262, 263, 265, 293, 311,
165, 169, 171–175, 181, 221, 236, 390, 402
262, 268, 298, 313, 322, 325, 327, universal, 93, 108, 126, 127, 153, 218
338, 405, 408–410 Homo oeconomicus, 344
Goods, 49, 58, 62, 76, 79, 114, 119, 149, Horizon
163, 169, 227, 251, 290, 317, 318, efficient, 117, 119
329–334, 337–339, 341–343, 363, future, 39, 51, 58, 63, 96, 117, 118, 122,
372 123, 126, 127, 129, 151, 152, 155,
Grammar, 4, 16, 17, 19, 27, 30, 32, 66, 156, 190, 218, 261, 278, 279, 283,
102–104, 118, 119, 122, 163 284, 286, 287, 296, 310, 311, 354,
pure logical, 16, 19, 27, 30, 32, 122 (see 365, 375, 392, 402, 407
Apophantics, formal) genetic, 117–119, 121–123
Gravitation, 219, 220, 223, 224, 397 historical, 82
Grounding, ultimate, 33–43, 385–388, 391 past, 63, 81–84, 95, 96, 107, 111, 117, 122,
Guilt, 62, 154 123, 128, 152–156, 191, 218, 232,
277, 283, 284, 288, 304, 313, 321,
327, 333, 353, 354, 356, 357, 365,
H 366, 389, 402, 413
Habit, habitual, 3, 23, 60, 125, 253, 261 temporal, 15, 81, 119, 123, 126, 128, 144,
Hellenism, 66, 67, 102 145, 151, 218, 372
Here, 46–48, 167, 178, 217, 218, 226, 297, Humanism, humanist, 67, 69, 74, 77, 78, 91,
351, 353, 381 92, 94, 101–110, 115, 116, 151, 383,
Hermeneuticism, 78, 384 395
Hermeneutics Hyle, hyletic, hyletical field, 3, 19, 20, 24, 30,
archaeological, 110 31, 37, 38, 45–48, 85, 172, 181, 189,
biblical, 103 216, 297, 300, 386, 388, 389, 392
circle of, 104 Hypothesis, 139, 162, 163, 176, 177, 223, 224,
first canon of, 103, 105, 111, 126, 128, 251–253, 258, 275, 290, 321
150–153, 156, 294, 353, 356
higher, 69, 113, 119–121, 123
juridical, 114, 347, 348, 350, 352–356 I
of the latent, 144 Idealism
lower, 118, 120, 352, 356, 401 German, 42, 387
philological, 56, 104, 129, 150, 151, 353, transcendental, 86
402 Idealization, mathematical, 74, 76, 187–189,
second canon of, 125 192, 197, 198, 200–203, 208, 209,
Historia, 65, 66 211, 216, 217, 219, 222, 224, 238,
Historicism, 69, 74, 164, 166, 379–390 241, 275
Historiography, 66, 101, 107–110, 132, 133, formal, 188, 189, 198, 200, 203, 211, 222,
135, 137, 138, 145, 147, 149, 311 224, 238, 275
History Ideographic, 71, 72, 74, 123, 257, 265, 273
as a collection of narratives (narrations) Ideological superstructure, 140
(historiai), 95, 109, 126, 127, 132, Ideology, 69, 140, 141, 274, 295, 312, 367
133, 136, 139, 258, 402 Image, 13, 30, 32, 164
contemporary, 95, 96, 107, 156, 283, 284, Imagination, 13, 17, 29–32, 174, 188, 193,
291, 311, 354, 355, 357, 360, 364, 194, 208, 245, 309, 328, 352, 364,
366, 371, 372, 374, 375, 405, 409 381, 397, 407
cultural, 105, 106, 124, 156, 263, 264 associative, 32
efficient, 11, 117, 151 Immanence, 35, 38, 48
natural, 66, 91, 95, 105, 252, 253, 258–261, Impossibility, 14, 27, 181, 202, 243, 402
263–265, 400 Indeterminacy
of nature, 91, 156, 252, 253, 257–265, 282, principle, 228
400, 404 relation, 227, 228
Subject Index 433

Indexical, 47, 50 extensional (semantics), 31, 161, 207

Individual, 3, 5, 15, 21, 29, 30, 41, 45, 46, genre, 58, 102–104, 119, 123, 133, 164,
50, 55, 59, 61, 71, 72, 79, 80, 165, 352, 356, 395
86, 103, 119–121, 123, 142–144, grammatical, 102, 103, 112, 118, 119,
146, 169, 174, 177–179, 187, 192, 122
205, 217, 226–228, 243, 245, 246, historical, 114, 118, 120, 125, 126, 304
249, 253, 264, 265, 267, 268, ideographic, 123
273, 278, 280, 285, 291, 293, 294, individual, 119–121, 356
296–300, 302–306, 308, 310–312, ontic (of the paradox of subjectivity), 39,
315, 316, 319, 321, 322, 324, 42, 385, 386
331, 333, 337, 341, 345, 349, ontic (of the phenomenological reduction),
356, 361, 370, 386, 387, 397, 400, 38, 41, 43, 85, 379, 388, 391, 399
406, 411 ontological, 34, 92, 167, 168, 212–222,
Induction, 13, 32, 162, 207 224–239, 241, 267, 272, 273, 275,
Inertial, 219, 220, 223, 224, 236 384
Instantiation, universal, 132, 133, 135 philological, 7, 73, 82, 107, 109, 111–114,
Instrument, 168, 181, 182, 186, 214, 116–119, 122, 123, 125, 126, 150,
228, 235–237, 245, 248, 152, 155, 261, 356, 357, 391, 402,
264, 266–268, 270–276, 316, 403
361, 399 philological historical, 151–153, 156, 165,
Instrumentalism, 168, 230, 237, 238, 265–276 261, 263, 353, 357, 364, 373, 375
Intelligent design, 172, 254, 404 scheme of, 92, 281
Intension, 31, 32 of texts, 4, 19, 66, 89, 102, 105, 116, 118,
of terms, 31 127, 150, 156, 165, 373, 412
Intention, intentionality Interpretationism, 78
active, 20, 24, 37, 38, 47, 85, 386 Interpreter, 56, 66, 77, 84, 94–96, 104–106,
direct, 12, 15, 16, 35, 36, 38–40, 42, 53, 86, 111–117, 119, 128, 129, 150–153,
87, 225, 387, 389 213, 283, 294, 295, 298, 305, 306,
oblique, 12, 15, 36, 38–40, 42, 87, 218, 353, 354, 356, 375, 402, 405, 411,
225, 386, 387, 389 412
original (of the author), 112, 113, 320, 356, professional, 84
402 Intersubjectivity/intersubjective
Interaction constitution of, 86, 389, 392
civil, 330, 333, 346, 351, 352, 361, 362, in principle, 169
365, 366, 369, 372, 375, 393 relative, 88, 153, 154, 198
economical, 339, 341–345, 352, 364, 365, transcendental, 42, 386, 388
369, 372, 373, 407 Intuition
political, 307, 358, 372, 373 categorical, 17
practical, 51, 298, 313, 318, 322, 326, 327, eidetic, 3, 5, 13, 15, 25–33, 90, 141, 309,
329–335, 337–344, 349, 350, 363, 385
365, 372, 373, 392–394, 404 of essences, 15, 16, 27–29
trade, 333, 335–337, 340 intellectual, 43
Interpretant, 50 Invention, technological, 58, 61
Interpretation
archaeological, 4, 81, 102, 106, 107, 109,
110, 118, 124, 126, 129, 156, 261, J
263, 264 Jurisprudence, 1, 65, 72, 80, 82–84, 111, 154,
authorized, 57 282, 307, 346–363, 365, 366, 368,
epistemic (of the paradox of subjectivity), 372, 373, 409, 412, 413
38, 39, 384, 386 Jurist, 65, 82, 83, 347, 353, 357–359
epistemic (of the phenomenological Justice, 65, 82, 140, 345, 346, 352, 357, 360,
reduction), 40, 41, 43, 80, 87, 93, 367, 412
94, 391 administration of, 82, 367
434 Subject Index

K 262–276, 278, 297–299, 313, 329,

Kinaesthesis, 46 332, 364, 397, 404
Knowledge foreign cultural, 60, 81, 84, 124, 145, 147,
scientific, 88, 264 152, 153, 364
theoretical, 2, 3, 88, 89, 269, 307 pre-scientific, 60, 62, 73, 77, 154, 174, 262,
theory of, 2, 3, 26, 73, 87, 88, 179, 386 270, 271, 278, 287, 292, 316, 393,
411
with sciences, 60, 77, 107, 154, 181, 182,
L 232, 236, 262, 265–276, 278, 286,
Laboratory, 172, 176, 181, 393 297, 316, 322, 355, 392, 404
Language, 17, 19, 21, 47, 69, 91, 103, 118, social, 34, 51–53, 77, 78, 80, 87, 147,
119, 122, 123, 132–134, 137, 140, 265, 295, 308, 316, 348, 352, 362,
149, 151, 162, 170, 171, 178–180, 369
184, 209, 226, 227, 233, 238, 243, spatial and temporal structures of the, 52,
250, 251, 270–272, 352, 381, 382, 95, 187, 200, 208, 211, 216, 410
401, 403, 404 Lifeworld, 3, 5–7, 23, 33, 34, 38, 45–97, 101,
mathematical, 163, 167, 183 102, 105–111, 113, 115, 124–126,
Lattice, 226 128, 129, 137, 140, 142–145, 147,
Law 148, 152–155, 162, 164, 170–172,
application of, 70, 82, 83, 150, 154, 155, 174, 178, 180–182, 187, 190, 192,
347, 348, 351–357, 365, 366, 373, 194, 198, 200, 201, 208, 210–213,
375, 413 216, 218, 220, 224, 230, 232, 233,
causal, 71–74, 92, 131, 154, 162, 163, 235–237, 239, 240, 253, 258–276,
176, 184, 186, 220, 223, 247, 248, 278, 281, 282, 284–287, 290,
250–252, 257, 258, 260, 261, 264, 292–299, 301, 305, 307–309, 313,
280, 283, 322 315, 316, 318, 320–322, 329–346,
constitutional, 358, 360, 374 348, 352, 355, 361–366, 369,
court of, 82, 83, 107, 154–156, 316, 352, 379–382, 389–397, 399, 402–404,
354–358, 412, 413 410, 411
customary, 51, 61, 350, 358 Limit, 2, 7, 29, 38, 41, 62, 70, 88, 95, 112, 117,
enforcement of the, 351, 368, 369, 374, 375 122, 127, 133, 136, 138, 141, 147,
history of, 83, 346–348, 350–352, 360, 148, 180, 185, 187, 193, 196, 197,
364, 373 204, 211, 216, 226, 228, 232, 242,
natural, 63, 91, 265, 347, 359 254, 278, 290, 295, 303, 319, 327,
of nature, 60, 62, 63, 71, 91, 172, 181, 275, 330, 339, 345, 348, 363, 371, 372,
351, 356, 368 374, 411, 412
penal, 350, 352, 368 ideal, 28, 29, 188, 193–195, 197–199, 202,
positive, 83, 347, 351–357, 359, 360, 363, 208, 217, 397
365, 373, 374, 412 Lingualism, 174
of practical reason, 360 Lingualist, 164, 180
science of the, 81, 83, 306, 307, 320, 344, Linguistics, 32, 47, 50, 51, 53, 69, 112, 117,
346–375, 410 119, 123, 132, 246, 323, 401, 405,
systems of the, 347, 350, 352, 353, 359, 406
369, 373–375 historical, 21, 119, 384
text of a, 82, 348, 350, 357, 373 Literary criticism
Lawgiving crisis of, 59
legitimate, 334, 348, 358–360, 367, 368 tradition, 55, 57–60, 66, 67, 78, 82, 84, 95,
power of, 350, 358, 366 102, 104, 106, 118, 119, 128, 156,
Life, organic 213, 263, 323, 348, 353, 358, 362,
constitution of, 45, 47, 178, 390 383, 385, 393–395, 2654
cultural, 50, 51, 53, 56–61, 68, 75, 78–84, Logic
106–109, 113, 115, 124–126, 128, classical, 132, 161, 226
129, 145, 147, 152–154, 156, 171, formal, 12, 17, 25, 31, 134, 169, 200, 204,
174, 181, 182, 213, 236, 240, 205, 209, 283
Subject Index 435

formalized, 4, 12, 29, 31, 132–135, 185, Measurement, 178, 179, 192, 194, 217–219,
200, 206, 209 225–228, 233, 240, 331
inductive, 70, 71 techniques, 178, 331
modal, 132, 226, 227 Measuring rod, 179, 192, 193, 217, 334, 336
non-classical, 226 Mechanics, 163, 166, 168, 177, 215, 219, 220,
post-classical, 132, 226 224–227, 229, 234, 236, 238, 247,
pure, 16, 17, 19, 27, 30, 32, 122 267, 271, 275
statistical, 163, 177, 225
Memory
M of others, 107
Manifold primordial, 46
definite, 17, 188, 189, 196, 204, 205, 207, subjective, 49, 56, 155
211 Merchandize, 334, 336–338
pure, 170, 171 Merchant, 143, 333, 334, 336–339, 342, 344,
Market 370
economy, 307, 317, 329–334, 336–339, Mereology, 422
341–345, 365, 372, 373 Meta-genre, 58, 114, 121, 164, 165, 174, 182,
financial, 339 267, 269, 274, 394, 395, 397
value, 334 Meta-mathematics, 17, 18, 28, 204, 205, 207
Mass, 171, 216, 219, 223, 224, 329, 352, 381 Metaphysics/metaphysical, 2, 43, 167, 184,
Material, 3, 13, 45–64, 66, 101, 132, 168, 185, 213, 215, 228, 239, 387–389, 394
259, 278, 385 Method
raw, 49–51, 59, 61, 62, 64, 106, 214, 372 analytic, 198
Mathematical operation, 196, 200, 203, 205, archaeological, 94, 105
212, 243 comparative, 106, 124, 264
Mathematics compositive, 198
classical, 4, 164, 186, 200, 201, 203, 211, descriptive, 42
213, 222, 227, 391, 398 dialectical, 43
modern, 4, 274, 334 doctrine of, 1, 2, 31, 89, 101–111, 118, 127,
post classical, 186, 198, 200, 202, 203, 287, 151, 162, 332, 353, 366, 395
381, 398 philological historical, 4, 94–96, 112, 113,
Mathesis universalis, 4, 16–23, 41, 170, 171, 127, 128, 151, 154, 282, 291, 326,
184, 188, 189, 196, 204, 206, 356, 372, 390, 402
207, 209, 239, 276, 287, 382, 383, resolutive, 198
398 synthetic, 199
Matter, 6, 17, 23, 27, 28, 50, 74, 86, 114, Methodology, 1, 16, 60, 68, 102, 136, 162,
171, 175, 179, 205, 214, 215, 223, 185, 267, 278–281, 380
241–243, 249, 253, 254, 258, 260, of philological historical research, 92, 102,
269, 301, 382, 399, 405 129, 320, 354, 380
Meaning Middle Ages, 13, 65, 67, 68, 102, 105, 109,
meaning, 7, 16, 27, 30–32, 34, 38, 54, 57, 142, 184, 197, 215, 238, 346, 359,
61, 62, 66, 89, 91–95, 101–104, 383, 395
106, 107, 112, 114, 119, 122, 125, Mlitary power, 274, 329, 369
128, 129, 134, 141, 152, 154, 164, Moment
167, 169–171, 179, 204–206, 214, abstract, 18, 19, 28, 30, 75, 111, 116, 142,
221, 239, 250, 252, 253, 260, 267, 172, 178, 188, 192–194, 206, 216,
275, 282, 288, 289, 292, 295, 303, 324, 397
309–311, 314, 318–321, 324, 325, dependent, 18, 21, 22, 25, 46
328, 343, 344, 347, 351, 353–355, Momentum, 226, 228, 235, 236
358–360, 380, 381, 384, 399, 401, Monetary system, 329, 339, 3334
403, 404 Money, 333, 334, 337–340
objective, 205, 282, 289, 310, 324, 353, Monument, 55, 57, 60, 67–69, 74, 81, 102,
360 105–110, 118, 123, 124, 156, 257,
Means in action and interaction, 50 260, 261, 263, 264, 396, 402, 403
436 Subject Index

Motive positive, 193

because, 289, 290, 292, 312, 316, 319, 323 transfinite, 196, 238
in-order-to, 281, 289, 290, 306, 312, whole, 185, 193, 195
314–316, 318, 319, 324, 326, 349, Nunc stans, 24
364, 371–374, 380, 393
Movement, 34, 43, 46, 47, 85, 153, 171, 173,
175, 178, 179, 215–217, 219, 221, O
223, 226, 258, 264, 266, 268, 271, Object
318, 381, 387, 394 formal ideal, 26, 201
kinaesthetic, 47, 178, 198, 217 in general, 41
Music, 164, 184, 307, 341 ideal, 3, 5, 12, 14, 15, 26, 29, 74, 86, 87,
Mutation, 253 90, 91, 137, 142, 168, 178, 179, 185,
187, 190, 195, 200, 202, 205, 208,
216, 231, 239, 275, 297, 327, 329,
N 383
Narration, 65, 95, 107, 126, 127, 132–136, intentional, 2, 3, 5, 6, 15–17, 20, 24, 25,
139, 249, 252, 258, 310, 358, 395, 32, 33, 36, 38–41, 48, 51, 54, 88,
402 169, 172, 180, 189, 191, 205, 206,
Narrative, historical, 127, 134, 145, 262, 355 217, 243, 269, 285, 287, 297, 311,
Narrative report, 145 389
Narratives (historiai), 65, 66 intersensory, 90, 172
Naturalism, 11, 74, 161, 300, 364, 379–390 material ideal, 26, 59, 142
reductive, 220 physical, 47, 244, 336
Nature real, 13, 28, 29, 48, 75, 91, 186, 187, 190,
objective, 74 223, 327
real, 168, 171, 231 transcendent, 24, 36–39, 47, 48, 55, 326
Necessity, 27, 79, 84, 142, 150, 229, 388 Observable, 7, 90–95, 166, 167, 171, 174–176,
Noema, noematic, 17, 33 179, 210, 215, 225, 227, 229, 232,
Nominalism, 31, 205, 207, 237 239, 240, 247, 267, 271, 312, 320,
Nonsense, 27, 135 341, 372, 380, 392, 394, 397
grammatical, 27 Observation
Norm, normative, 2, 17, 23, 65, 89, 102–105, disinterested, 89, 93, 94, 128, 152, 156,
108, 119, 122, 142, 154, 161, 282, 284, 290, 293–296, 298,
163, 165, 203, 204, 207, 211, 261, 305, 306, 326, 327, 371, 375,
269, 274, 278, 286, 305, 312, 313, 402, 411
352–354, 360, 368, 394, 397, 400, empirical, 14, 332
407, 412 empirical basis of, 144, 175, 308, 399
Now, 28, 29, 31, 35, 45, 46, 48, 54, 56, 58, 66, intersensory, 2, 3, 90, 91, 179, 180, 215,
82, 83, 107, 108, 110, 115, 129, 146, 239, 301, 305, 371, 380, 392, 393,
152, 162, 191, 201, 217, 218, 225, 396, 399, 404–406, 410
232, 236, 293, 297, 305, 308, 314, statements, 179, 181
325, 328, 333, 336, 341, 353, 364, theory-laden, 180, 181
382, 385, 388, 389, 395, 396, 406 value free, 89
actual, 24, 31, 35, 37, 39, 54, 189–191, Observer, 156, 223, 228, 229, 234, 236,
218, 389 289–291, 293, 295, 298, 305, 306,
Number 318, 327, 332
algebraic, 185, 203 disinterested, 93, 94, 128, 284, 290, 293,
cardinal, 191, 210 295, 298, 305, 326, 327, 375, 409,
complex, 4, 185, 196, 201–203, 212, 225, 411
231, 238, 243, 287 Ontology
imaginary, 185, 196, 203 formal, 4, 5, 16–28, 32, 35, 195, 203–206,
irrational, 202, 203 208, 209, 239, 243, 247, 276, 383,
negative, 193, 203 398
ordinal, 191 material, 18, 247, 248
Subject Index 437

pre-scrientific, 174, 213, 216, 219, 232, of psychology, 5, 74, 80, 86, 277, 296, 315,
248, 249, 269, 288 391, 396
regional, 33, 288 pure, 7, 14, 15, 17, 25, 29, 30, 41, 86
scientific, 174, 213, 216, 219, 232, 242, of the social world, 3, 5, 23, 34, 79, 307,
248, 249, 267, 288 327
Ontotheological, 174, 213, 214, 218, 221, 238, static, 3, 23, 188, 242
266 Philological rhetorical syndrome, 66
Onto-theology, 213, 215 Philology (philologist), 4, 65–69, 72, 96, 97,
Opertation, arithmentical, 184, 188–190, 192, 101–105, 109–113, 115–120, 122,
194–200, 203, 340, 394 123, 127, 128, 150, 151, 330, 384,
Ordering, linear, 225 395, 402
Organism Philosophical ontology, 213–216, 218, 230,
human, 305 246, 266, 269–273, 288, 399
humanoid, 264 Philosophy practical
Other (person) continental, 162
appresentation of, 37 of nature, 162, 167, 169, 174, 175, 181,
giveness of, 33, 34, 36–38, 40–42, 45, 48, 183, 199, 213, 215, 220, 224, 230,
52, 124, 180, 386, 387, 404 251, 266, 271, 275
Owner, 331, 333, 336, 337, 341 prescientific of nature, 399
Ownness, 37, 86, 87, 392 Physician, 304, 305
sphere of, 37, 86, 87, 392 Physics, 4, 12, 72, 161, 183, 258, 287, 380
classical, 4, 171, 174, 183, 186, 196–201,
211–226, 228, 230–236, 238, 239,
P 241, 258, 275, 381, 382, 397, 398,
Paleontology, 73, 95, 105, 156, 260, 264, 400 400, 403
Paradigm, 14, 69, 70, 161, 163–165, 180, 183, Physiology, 142, 161, 304, 305, 380, 382
198, 199, 252, 359, 383, 384 post classical, 4, 132, 163, 164, 166,
Paradigm shift, 164, 165, 183, 380, 383, 384 171, 183, 185, 186, 196, 198–203,
Paradox 211–213, 216, 220, 222–240, 258,
of psychologism, 15 275, 287, 381, 383, 398
reduction, 33, 382 Piece, 18, 19, 21, 22, 28, 192, 208
of subjectivity, 26, 33–43, 379–390 Poetry, poet, 32, 52, 55, 57, 58, 65, 66, 72, 76,
Part 88, 101, 102, 121, 123, 132, 174,
dependent, 13, 18, 27–29, 32, 35, 38, 269, 317
48, 129, 192, 193, 195, 206, 208, Political, 59, 62, 70, 83, 96, 140, 141, 144,
242, 243, 248, 288, 293, 301, 154, 157, 164, 213, 267, 274, 288,
316, 319, 333, 335, 339, 349, 393, 294, 306, 307, 322, 328, 331, 344,
397, 403 346–375, 410, 412, 413
independent, 18–21, 32, 94, 191, 195, 208, phenomena, 81
242–246, 248, 270, 280, 285, 315, power, 58, 59, 61, 65, 76, 80, 81, 142, 150,
316, 406, 412 164, 274, 275, 316, 334, 338, 349,
materially dependent, 27 354, 358–361, 363, 365, 367, 369,
syncategorematic, 17 373, 374
Participation, practical, 293 structure, 60, 81, 140, 348, 350, 352,
Past 359
immediate, 49, 51, 61, 81, 85, 96, 107, 126, Politics, 65, 70, 237, 269, 274, 277, 278, 283,
144, 155, 156, 277, 283, 284, 311, 346–362, 366, 394
353, 355, 366, 375, 389, 413 Position, 13, 14, 34, 45, 73, 74, 86, 113, 140,
primordial, 60 195, 205, 221, 226–228, 234–237,
Perception, 23, 46, 175, 179, 300 258, 273, 275, 278, 279, 292, 349,
Phenomenology 352, 369, 380, 384, 388, 405
generative, 3, 23, 55 Positivism, 3, 70, 73, 74, 161, 169, 228, 234,
genetic, 23, 55, 242 308, 318, 347, 352, 357, 359, 360
mundane, 86, 87 historical, 69, 360
438 Subject Index

Postulate Psychologism
of adequacy, 79, 289, 315, 319–321, empirical, 32
323–325, 328 naturalistic, 13, 14, 74, 383
of clarity and distinctness, 318 transcendental, 14, 26
of consistency, 315, 318 Psychology
relevance, 315, 319, 320 analyzing, 70
subjective interpretation, 319 descriptive, 11–16, 26, 30, 41, 42, 72, 79,
Predecessor, 25, 48, 52–57, 66, 68, 74, 78–82, 80, 278
84, 92, 94, 95, 128, 152, 248, 294, empirical, 13, 32, 277, 296, 297, 299, 346
310, 324, 396, 401, 411 everyday, 143, 144, 148, 262
Prediction, 25, 32, 63, 72, 73, 76, 78, 81, 85, experimental, 12, 13, 277, 286, 299–301,
91, 92, 96, 129, 139, 156, 157, 304, 305, 323, 380, 406
168, 172, 175, 176, 185, 210, 217, individual, 80, 278, 300, 302–306, 312,
218, 231, 232, 237, 239, 245, 247, 316, 324, 406, 411
257, 270, 275, 279–296, 301, 304, as a natural science, 72, 144, 148, 170,
310, 312–314, 318, 321–323, 325, 183–185, 391
328–330, 332, 333, 340–344, 354, phenomenological, 5, 74, 80, 86, 277, 296,
355, 360, 364–375, 392, 396, 404, 315, 391, 396
405, 407–409, 411, 412 social, 80, 86, 87, 278, 285, 286, 289, 299,
causal, 73, 76 301, 302, 305, 306, 310–312, 315,
Pre-historical, 105, 106, 109, 110, 124, 316, 321, 345, 370, 406–408, 411
263–265, 350 understanding, 72, 73, 80, 148, 277, 279,
Pre-history, 65, 95, 109, 179, 240, 263, 264, 285, 300, 301, 304
396, 404 Psychosomatic, 86, 87
Pre-judgment, 112, 126, 145 Purpose, 2, 12, 45, 75, 102, 136, 165, 184, 264,
Pre-predicative, 20, 30, 87 278, 380
Present, actual, 46, 49, 50, 63, 95, 96, 127,
139, 144–146, 154–156, 174, 279,
283, 311, 333, 362, 366, 411 Q
Price, 334, 337–341, 343 Quality
Primordial, 6, 19, 23, 24, 31, 33, 34, 36–38, 40, primary, 7, 170, 171, 178, 221, 222, 248
41, 43, 45–48, 53–55, 60, 86, 172, secondary, 7, 170, 178, 181, 222, 240, 248
178, 179, 189, 216–218, 257, 288, Quantity, numerical, 191
296, 297, 300, 388, 389, 392 Quantum theory, 169, 171, 185, 211–213, 221,
Primordial sphere, 37, 45–48, 86, 189, 392 224–228, 233–236, 239, 240, 249,
Probability 267, 330, 381, 383
calculus, 330 Quantum mechanics, 163, 166, 168, 177,
density, 228, 229 225–227, 234, 236, 238, 267, 275
Producer, 333, 334, 336–339 Question
Product, 31, 32, 50, 59, 95, 106, 191, 196, 215, diagnostic, 290, 291, 295, 298, 302, 370
223, 243, 251, 315, 323, 331–333, inquisitive, 290, 291, 295
335, 337, 339, 342, 343, 365, 393,
400
Production R
means of, 332 Rationalism, 43, 267, 271
sources of, 331 Reading, 74, 92, 115, 116
Profit, 293, 338, 339, 341, 344, 345, 372 first, 115, 116, 125, 181, 395, 401, 403
Proof, formal, 2, 90 Reality
Prophet, 57, 58, 66, 76, 108, 323, 324 brute, 46, 47, 85, 267, 268, 270, 388, 393
Protention, 24, 31, 39, 46, 172, 190, 297 objective, 13
Psychiatry, 304, 305 socio-cultural, 75
clinical, 72 transcendent, 48
Psychical function, 13 Recollection, 54
Psychoanalysis, 144, 298, 300, 303, 306 intersubjective, 54
Subject Index 439

Reconstruction critical, 33, 35, 39, 41, 88, 89, 131, 179,
historical, 101, 109, 119, 120, 124–129, 239, 312, 325, 383
144, 151, 152, 154, 155, 261, 262, Reformation, 58, 67, 103, 147
284, 355, 390, 402, 403 Region, 1, 5–7, 17, 18, 33, 80, 88, 91–94,
intersubjective, 24, 25, 53, 54 96, 132, 165, 169, 206, 216, 245,
of past reality, 81, 101, 107, 124–126, 128, 275, 278, 281, 284, 288, 307, 308,
129, 140, 145, 146, 151, 152, 252, 313, 316, 318, 326, 329–346, 351,
257, 261, 263, 284, 294, 320, 353, 361–365, 368, 369, 371–375, 380,
355, 360, 380, 400–402, 404 381, 383, 389, 391, 394, 396–398,
Reduction 402, 404, 406, 410, 413
abstractive, 6, 7, 20, 36, 46, 56, 75, 76, 85, ontological, 1, 5, 7, 17, 77, 89, 93, 156,
87, 90, 92–95, 139–140, 156, 186, 242, 245–249, 253, 262, 275, 284,
217, 220, 222, 230, 270, 271, 281, 292–294, 308, 329, 330, 343, 348
284, 288, 293, 294, 342, 343, 380, Regress, indefinite, 35, 36, 39
398, 410 Rejection, 14, 32, 35, 57–60, 67, 68, 70, 84,
egological, 33, 34, 36–38, 40–42, 45, 86, 94, 104, 113, 114, 126, 136, 137,
87, 388 147, 150, 151, 161, 165, 166, 174,
eidetic, 16, 26 176, 205, 208, 213, 227, 230, 235,
epistemic interpretation of, 94 266, 272, 275, 279, 359, 388, 396
idealizing, 75 Relation
ontic interpretation of, 85 causal, 60–64, 75, 76, 81, 92, 137, 141, 142,
phenomenological, 15, 16, 26, 29, 30, 33, 155, 162, 174, 175, 178, 181, 185,
34, 36, 38, 40–42, 85–88, 93, 94, 186, 210, 217, 219, 220, 222, 226,
166, 287, 385, 386 230, 232, 237–239, 242, 244–249,
primordial, 33, 34, 36–38, 40–42, 45, 87, 251–253, 259–264, 268, 270, 271,
388 273, 280–284, 288, 292, 300,
psychological-phenomenological, 86 301, 311–314, 317, 318, 323, 328,
transcendental, 15, 26, 85–88, 93, 94, 287, 338, 341, 342, 365, 366, 368–370,
385, 386 373–375, 381, 390, 392–394, 407
Reference, 7, 17, 28, 31, 35, 49, 58, 80, 86, 90, formal property of, 18, 21, 22
97, 109, 111–113, 117–119, 121, material property of, 22
123, 128, 143, 148, 151, 164, 169, property of, 20, 22
170, 188, 240, 244, 250, 254, 263, unifying, 20
281–283, 289, 294, 305, 308, 309, Relativism, 26, 74, 90, 164, 166, 383
318, 319, 323, 360, 361, 384, 385, Relativity theory
387, 388, 402, 405 general, 171, 212
Reflection, reflective, 2, 4, 6, 7, 12, 14, 15, special, 212, 227, 231
28, 30, 33, 35, 36, 39–41, 45, 46, Renaissance, 58, 60, 67, 102, 105, 147, 184,
52, 58, 60, 62, 65, 70, 75, 76, 197, 214, 215, 218, 384, 395
79–81, 85–89, 93, 96, 102, 104, Report, 55, 58, 62, 63, 65, 82, 95, 101,
105, 107, 109, 110, 124, 125, 106–109, 120, 127, 131, 133, 135,
131, 132, 140, 141, 154, 156, 136, 139, 140, 143, 145, 147, 155,
162, 163, 165–167, 169–171, 175, 181, 258, 263, 297, 303, 305, 310,
176, 179–181, 183, 201, 203, 206, 311, 386, 402
209, 213, 215, 225, 226, 230, 232, Representation
234, 236–240, 257, 265, 266, 268, by analogy, analogical, 201, 202, 397
269, 271, 274, 278, 280, 281, 290, pictoral, 193, 194, 208, 212, 224, 231, 244,
293, 294, 296, 304, 306–308, 311, 246, 272, 382, 397, 398
312, 316, 318–320, 325, 329, 340, quasi-pictorial, 200–203, 208–209,
342–344, 346–348, 350, 352–354, 211–213, 222–225, 229, 231, 233,
358, 359, 363, 364, 366, 367, 373, 238, 239, 246, 275, 381, 382, 397,
379, 380, 382, 383, 385–391, 394, 398
396, 399–401, 405, 406, 409, 410, Reproduction, 24, 25, 31, 53, 63, 80, 190, 218,
412, 413 246, 297, 303
440 Subject Index

Re-reading, 116 270, 273, 275, 280, 287, 330, 343,

Research 380, 396, 397, 399
empirical, 70, 79, 93, 110, 187, 242, 244, history of, 164–166, 251, 265, 383
248, 279, 301, 302, 306, 311, 315, human, 4–7, 12, 19, 23, 34, 55, 56, 65–87,
327, 348, 350, 355, 366, 368, 369, 90–96, 101–110, 115, 119, 121, 122,
371, 400, 401, 404, 412 124, 125, 131, 132, 142–145, 147,
experimental, 2, 4, 35, 70, 72, 139, 163, 148, 150, 153, 156, 157, 162, 168,
167, 176, 210, 211, 244–247, 211, 250, 257–265, 277–375, 379,
249–252, 258, 260, 262–265, 267, 380, 385, 390–395, 397, 400, 401,
271, 273, 275, 276, 279, 280, 282, 403–406, 408, 410, 411
286, 301, 313, 326, 380, 390, 396, historical, 69, 81, 129, 164, 301, 384,
397, 399, 406 403, 410
historical, 73, 81, 82, 92, 95, 96, 102, systematic, 72, 73, 78–80, 83, 92, 94,
107–111, 116, 118–120, 123–126, 96, 105, 106, 124, 143, 148, 156,
128, 129, 131, 133, 138, 140–150, 157, 169, 257, 277–375, 390, 394,
152–157, 252, 257, 258, 261–265, 395, 397, 401, 403–405, 408, 409,
278, 282, 283, 294, 304, 320, 324, 411
326, 352–355, 359, 364, 371, 380, ideographic, 71, 72, 74, 123, 257, 265, 273
383, 384, 396, 400, 402, 403, 410, of the law, 81, 83, 306, 307, 320, 344,
411 346–362, 364–366, 368, 371, 410
program, 7, 161, 163–165, 381 life, 5–7, 11, 33, 72, 73, 75, 76, 105,
social, 81, 144, 295, 306, 313, 321, 157, 161, 163, 170, 177, 195, 215,
326–328, 340, 408 240–254, 257, 259, 260, 264, 265,
Retention, 39, 190, 297, 300, 389 272, 280, 288, 300, 301, 304, 314,
continuum of, 24, 31, 46, 172, 189, 218, 323, 330, 346, 374, 380, 381, 390,
297, 300 396–401, 403, 404, 408
Revolution, scientific, 163 of the mind, 70, 71
Rhetorics, 2, 66, 111, 121, 132, 395 moral, 70, 71
Romanticism, 69, 113, 120 natural, 2, 4, 6, 7, 11, 60, 69–71, 74, 75, 77,
Rome, Roman empire, 65–67, 108, 133, 78, 87, 91, 93, 101, 131, 161–213,
135–137, 346 230, 257–276, 278, 294, 332, 379,
381, 397
phenomenological theory of, 73, 79, 86, 88,
S 308, 391
Salvation, 66, 88, 108, 126, 153, 174, 213 political, 83, 306, 307, 328, 344, 346–375,
Schema, scheme, 30–32, 162, 206, 245, 246, 410, 412, 413
309, 407 social, 33, 52, 69, 73, 81, 84–85, 140, 161,
Science 278, 281, 285, 295, 306–328, 364,
of classical antiquity, 65, 69, 105, 395 369, 371, 374, 380, 407–411
cultural, 71, 80, 87, 390 soft, 161, 170, 240, 247, 251, 270
empirical, 2–4, 6, 7, 12, 14, 33, 45, 70, 80, spiritual, 380
83, 85–97, 153, 162, 186, 197–199, of understanding, 347, 391
203, 207, 235, 239, 275, 293, 301, Self-consciousness, 38, 45, 46
307, 308, 315, 318–320, 324–326, Self-experience, primordial, 46
329, 334, 338, 340, 341, 346, 351, Semantics, phenomenological, 18
355, 359, 364, 365, 368, 371–373, Sense
379, 383, 384, 390–413 inner, 12
of explanation, 347 outer, 12
formal, 2, 14, 87, 90, 137, 340, 383, 391, Sensibility, primordial, 46
397 Sequence, 24, 25, 54, 63, 64, 82, 115, 127,
hard, 4–7, 75, 91, 161, 163, 166, 168, 170, 133, 135, 156, 167, 175, 190, 191,
171, 177, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 193, 194, 196, 218, 221, 243, 249,
187, 208, 210, 211, 215, 216, 235, 250, 252, 259, 261, 265, 268, 288,
236, 240–249, 251–253, 259, 260, 289, 312, 317, 354, 386, 395
Subject Index 441

Sequential ordering, 191 342, 343, 349, 365, 372, 373, 397,
Set, 17, 25, 30, 32, 116, 119, 122, 136–139, 407, 408
176, 177, 184, 185, 191, 202, 203, Technological, 58–62, 109, 140–143, 148,
205, 219, 230, 241, 251, 252, 268, 154, 155, 230, 236, 237, 272, 286,
293, 301, 319, 325, 338, 357, 367, 305, 322, 326, 332, 333, 338, 339,
374, 381, 384 343, 344, 355, 364, 369, 372, 375,
Set theory, 17, 185 399
Sign, 50, 179, 192, 196, 205, 260, 261, 297 Technology, 76, 140, 142, 143, 162, 170, 182,
Sign matter, 179, 205, 260, 261, 297 237, 249, 265–276, 297, 301, 303,
Simultaneity, 223, 232, 233 304, 329–333, 344
Skepticism, 59, 67, 207, 208, 383 Temporality
Society, archaic, 57, 362, 373 intersubjective, 53, 126, 129, 151, 190, 283,
Sociologism, 87 297, 320, 326, 327, 392
Sociology, 72, 86, 278, 279, 286, 306, 307, structure of, 127, 128, 153
311, 362, 409, 410 Testability, 319, 320
Solipsism, 33, 34, 36, 386 Theology, protestant, 67
Space There
empty, 215, 223 manifold of, 46
Hilbert, 171, 212, 225–227, 233 multidimensional, 48
infinite, 216, 217 primordial, 46, 178
inner, 31, 46 Things in themselves, 6, 221, 222, 224, 239,
intersubjective, 48, 179, 217 272, 382
n-dimensional, 202, 211 Time
outer, 216 calendar, calendaric, 128, 258, 261, 264
primordial, 46 empty, 216
Spatiality, inner, 3, 297 Time consciousness (temporality)
Species, organic, 244, 245, 253, 401 inner, (internal), 15, 24, 30, 40, 41, 189,
Speech, 112, 251 389
Sphere, primordial, 37, 45–48, 86, 189, 392 intersubjective, 23
Statistical causality, 163, 177, 225 subjective, 23
Statistical frequency, 177 transcendent, 24
Statistics, 244 Tool, 50–52, 55, 59, 61, 62, 64, 67, 106, 122,
mathematical, 163, 330 124, 129, 144, 171, 173, 179, 180,
Stemma, 117, 123 194, 214, 235, 236, 257, 260, 261,
Structure, categorical, 30 263, 264, 266, 268, 270, 274, 275,
Substrate, concrete, 28, 32, 33 291, 312, 313, 315, 331, 334, 335,
Successor, 25, 48, 52, 53, 81, 84, 392 339, 341–344, 347, 352, 361, 372,
Supply, 342 393, 394
Symbol, 133, 202, 207, 209 Trace, 55, 63, 67, 69, 105, 107, 111, 116, 124,
Sympathy, 47, 345, 370 131, 145, 146, 148, 155, 156, 196,
Synthesis 224, 232, 252, 258–261, 263, 264,
active, 20, 31, 36, 46, 216, 386 279, 283, 303, 347, 388, 394, 398,
associative, 31, 32, 38, 40, 46, 386 400–404
passive, 18–20, 30, 31, 37, 38, 46, 47, 87, Trade, 76, 180, 322, 331, 333–341
172, 216, 386 Tradition
pre-predicative, 20, 30, 87 archaic, 58–60, 66, 83–84, 362
cultural, 59, 60, 83, 214, 323, 363, 373,
393
T false, 57
Taxonomy, 11, 79, 176, 180, 245, 246, 398 foreign, 82, 84
Technique, 4, 33, 61, 73, 156, 178, 184, 185, literary, 55, 57–60, 66, 67, 78, 84, 95,
218, 240, 241, 250, 252, 262, 263, 102, 104, 106, 118, 128, 156, 213,
266, 270–273, 275, 291, 312, 313, 263, 323, 353, 358, 362, 383, 385,
317, 322, 329, 331, 332, 334, 335, 393–395
442 Subject Index

Tradition (cont.) 210–214, 217, 219, 220, 230,

oral, 50, 55, 56, 60, 362 235–237, 240, 241, 243, 246, 247,
own, 67, 68, 84, 152 260–263, 266–275, 282, 285–288,
written, 57–61, 82, 107, 109, 124, 184, 263, 291, 292, 298, 300, 302, 310,
264, 350, 363 312–314, 318, 329, 331–335, 337,
Transaction, 184, 192, 293, 333, 335–340, 363, 339, 340, 343, 344, 349, 360, 361,
365 363, 392, 393, 395–397, 399, 403,
Transcendence, 38, 40, 48, 55, 85 404, 406, 410, 411
Transcendental, 2, 4, 14, 15, 17, 26, 30–32, 34, first order, 6, 57, 76–78, 96, 165, 168, 210,
35, 42, 43, 45, 74, 85–88, 93, 94, 96, 239, 258–261, 270, 277, 278, 280,
161, 186, 188, 189, 196, 204–207, 285–287, 289, 291, 292, 294, 296,
209, 221, 236, 385–389, 391 301, 302, 305, 310–314, 317–321,
Transfer, associative, 47, 286, 298 323, 325, 327, 340, 342–345, 349,
Transformation 365, 371, 382, 392, 393, 396–397,
Galileo, 197–198, 212, 218, 223 401–409
Lorentz, 212, 223 general theory of, 72
Translation higher, 5, 6, 49, 51, 52, 56–59, 61, 62, 73,
operator, 238 76–78, 81, 85, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 96,
radical, 180 101, 106, 109, 110, 123, 124, 129,
Trial and error, 270 142, 153, 154, 164–166, 168, 171,
Type 172, 174, 179, 181, 182, 190, 196,
cognitative (cognitive), 48, 89, 166, 169, 197, 200, 210, 213, 220, 230, 237,
175, 176, 178, 187, 190, 217, 245, 241, 246, 249, 257, 260, 262, 263,
292, 293, 326, 328, 335, 383, 391, 267, 269, 273, 274, 278, 285, 299,
392 302, 312, –314, 323, 332, 334, 335,
course of action, 315, 316, 321 340, 343, 349, 351, 362, 363, 367,
empirical, 32, 245, 309, 350, 367, 369, 370, 373, 374, 392–395, 397,
398 406, 408
ideal, 7, 33, 52, 53, 59, 87, 141–143, intersubjective, 4, 75, 270
166, 281, 287, 291, 303, 308–311, misunderstanding, 29, 31, 49, 53, 67, 68,
314–325, 327–332, 336–342, 344, 78, 104, 115, 116, 282, 284, 287,
345, 348, 350, 352, 354, 356, 289, 290, 292, 294, 298, 299, 302,
364–369, 371, 372, 374, 375, 401, 310, 314, 325, 405, 411
403, 407–412 not understanding, 49, 53, 59, 67, 115, 116,
morphological, 52 282, 284, 287, 289, 290, 298, 302,
personal, 315 310, 314, 325, 393, 405, 411
objective, 4, 52
productive, 78, 287, 411
U re-creative, 76
Uncertainty principle, 228 reproductive, 299–300
Uncertainty relation, 228 second order, 6, 78, 96, 258, 260, 285–287,
Understanding 290, 292, 296, 305, 310, 312, 314,
animalic, 45–49, 52, 60, 76, 220, 297, 298, 318, 325, 327, 340, 343, 348, 392,
300, 317, 323, 335, 349, 361, 365, 393, 396–397
392, 404, 406 subjective, 52, 289, 309, 310
contemplative, 5, 51, 174, 374 theoretical, 5, 165, 174, 213, 269
creative, 56–58, 76, 77 Unit, 5, 17, 28, 29, 179, 191–197, 200, 203,
descriptive and analyzing, 71 205, 206, 208–210, 217, 225,
elementary, 5, 6, 49–52, 56, 58, 59, 61–64, 242–244, 334, 337–340
73, 76–78, 81, 85, 88, 93, 94, 96, Universality
106, 109, 110, 123, 124, 128, 129, empirical, 143
142, 153, 156, 171–175, 178–182, logical, 243
184–187, 190–192, 194–199, Utilitarianism, utilitarian, 266
Subject Index 443

V Whole
Validity extensive, 115, 125
intersubjective, 3, 90, 154, 191, 348, 392 first order, 19–21, 30, 32, 51, 122, 191, 193,
in principle, 1, 88–90, 169 194, 208, 242, 309, 314, 335, 403
objective, 1, 3, 70, 84, 85, 88–90, 103, 105, higher order, 19–23, 25, 32, 122, 191, 208,
111, 118, 165, 187, 194, 199, 205, 242, 285, 309, 314, 403, 407
267, 281, 284, 289, 302, 310, 311, independent, 18–23, 28, 29, 51, 242, 243,
315, 318, 324, 353, 354, 356, 370, 248, 260, 269, 398, 403, 412
383, 384, 392, 410 organic, 19, 21, 191, 242–243, 245–248,
Value 250, 280, 285, 314, 398, 403, 404
cultural, 68, 75, 299 World
ethical, 75, 294 Einstein/Minkowski, 224, 232
free, 89, 152, 375, 411 giveness of the, 38, 86, 93, 94
intrinsic, 335–337, 339, 340 historical, 4, 49, 80, 384, 391
market, 334, 346 life, 3, 5–7, 23, 33, 34, 38, 45–97, 101,
moral, 74, 75, 312, 360 102, 105–111, 113, 115, 124–126,
theory, 14 128, 129, 137, 140, 142–145, 147,
trade, 335–338, 340 148, 152–155, 162, 164, 170–172,
Variable, 17, 136, 184, 200–202, 206, 209, 174, 178, 180–182, 187, 190–213,
210, 226, 321 216, 218, 220, 224, 230, 232, 233,
hidden, 224, 227–229, 234 235–237, 239, 240, 253, 258–276,
Variation 278, 281, 282, 284–287, 290,
active, 32 292–299, 301, 305, 307–309, 313,
eidetic, 29, 30, 142, 224 315, 316, 318, 320–322, 329–346,
free fantasy, 26–28, 32, 188 348, 352, 355, 361–364, 369,
in imagination, 13, 17, 29, 188, 193, 194, 379–382, 389–397, 399, 402–404,
245, 246, 328, 352, 364, 381, 397, 410, 411
407 material, 93
Vector, 197, 198, 212, 219, 225 practical, 50, 51
Verification, 70, 90, 102, 162, 320, 405 primordial, 37, 45–48, 86, 189, 257, 288,
300, 392
real, 85, 168, 187, 236
W spiritual, 7, 93, 265, 379, 384–386, 390,
Wave, 212, 223, 227, 228, 233, 234, 267, 391
294 transcendent, 35, 38, 40
Wealth, 274, 329, 333, 334, 338, 341, 342, universal, 127
344–346, 365, 370, 372 World points, 223, 224, 232, 236, 258, 287
Weight, 192, 219, 220, 224, 227, 287, 298, Worldview, 59, 60, 68, 71, 77, 85, 142, 144,
330, 335 147, 148, 251, 323, 341, 369, 374