The philosophers in the heart of the continent were certainly familiar with skepticism. By the early twentieth century, they were skeptical about, e.g., whether the impressive and highly formalized achievements of mathematical logic offer any substantive content. It would be an oversimplification to categorize England as the home of skepticism and the continent as the home of robust metaphysics.
Britain had its own system-builders, e.g., F.H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet. Nonetheless, different trends are discernable between Britain and central Europe, and these trends encourage historians of philosophy to venture generalizations.
Central Europe had its own skeptics, too, but Julian Roberts writes:
This skepticism, however, has been more characteristic of philosophy in the Anglo-American realm and in France than it has of German thinking.
One need only to think of Locke’s reference to ‘essence’ as “something, I know not what,” or to think of Hume’s scrutiny of causation and of the self. Likewise, the reader will recall Descartes resolving to set aside all previous knowledge as dubitable and begin anew from nothing, and recall Voltaire embracing a minimalistic deism and attacking sacred text. Skepticism is clear in these examples.
Further east on the continent, however, even radical views which could have been the outcomes of skepticism were instead embraced as the outcomes of metaphysical reasoning. Examples might be Schopenhauer’s idealism or Heidegger’s alleged atheism.
Even logic, a rather austere region within philosophy, becomes a rich garden of metaphysics in the hands of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who start with algebraic principles and find them to the source of nearly everything. Julian Roberts writes:
Thinkers in Germany and Austria, where indeed modern mathematical logic largely originated (together with the Vienna Circle’s highly influential nominalism), have remained far more optimistic about the chances for a generalized critical project. The most prominent anti-transcendentalist in Germany was, of course, Heidegger. But Heidegger is not particularly representative. In particular, a rigorous transcendentalism which embraces the challenge of mathematical logic has also produced crucial work. Husserl was the progenitor of this tradition (though ‘phenomenology’ as such was a failure, as we shall see); and its contemporary representatives are to be found, for example, in the so-called Erlangen school. Habermas, though better known than they, is in fact one of their major beneficiaries.
Julian Roberts calls Husserl’s phenomenology a ‘failure’ because Husserl at first hoped to build a system on the foundations of pure logic, but then encountered, as noted above, that despite its technical rigor and despite the strength of its impressive formal structure, logic is ultimately empty, delivering no content in terms a metaphysics, epistemology, or other branches of philosophy.
Husserl engaged extensively with Frege and with Frege’s work, and was willing to populate his ontology with words, their meanings, and their referents as three separate categories. “Husserl represents another side to” Frege’s “developments.”
“But his early attempt to rationalize time and space is comparable,” Julian Roberts asserts, “with what Kant called Leibniz’s ‘intellectualizing of appearances’ and has the same weaknesses.”
The later Husserl (the Husserl of the ‘life-world’) overcompensated by lapsing into what is an almost relativist position, at least as it stands.The most interesting continuation of the Husserlian project appears in the constructivism of the Erlangen school, and in Habermas’s appropriation of related themes.
Philosophers after Husserl pursued “attempts to rescue transcendentalist aspects of the Husserlian project, and also” seek “to vindicate (against Habermas) the thought that although there may be aspects of human practice that are ‘unprethinkable’, intersubjectivity is, in the end, a rational tribunal.”
The term ‘unprethinkable’ is used by Heidegger (Unvordenkliche) to indicate the unpredictable and dynamic nature of meaning. For Heidegger, it is as if words have an unforeseeable career: their uses, semantic fields, and effects changing over time and in various circumstances.
Yet Husserl falls into broader patterns which link him with patterns of philosophy in France and England. Frederick Copleston writes:
Several philosophers have tried to make philosophy properly scientific by taking as a point of departure an unquestionable datum or proposition. Descartes was one of them, Husserl another. And the transcendental Thomists join the company. Even if however it is allowed that the attempt to develop a presuppositionless philosophy is legitimate, the question arises whether idealism does not result if the subject is taken as the basis of all philosophical reflection.
Copleston argues that Husserl’s famous ‘bracketing’ drove him into some form of idealism:
Husserl’s approach led him eventually into the development of an idealist philosophy.
Copleston cites Sartre’s critique of Husserl. Sartre asserted that Husserl would ultimately end up with solipsism: “In Sartre's opinion Husserl cannot escape solipsism.”
Ultimately, a broad survey of any philosopher’s work runs the danger of degenerating into painting in very broad strokes — in this case, with words like ‘empiricism’ and ‘skepticism’ and ‘phenomenology’ and others. This is the perennial problem of doing the history of philosophy with constructs instead of with the close reading of a given author’s texts. Finally, these broad constructs begin to collapse into one another, and into the temptation to pose questions like ‘isn’t phenomenology simply a form of empiricism?’ and ‘doesn’t idealism necessarily lead to solipsism?’ Such questions, and their answers, have less and less content.
Although this exploration of secondary literature is interesting, the close reading of primary text is the surer and better way: instead of reading about Husserl, the reader will be better served by reading Husserl.
