Husserl was devoted to the importance of human reason,
increasingly so as Europe sank into the morass of totalitarian
ideology in the 1930 s. He attended to Max Weber’s warning
concerning the dangers of separating reason from value.
Husserl, following Weber, cautioned against basing life either
on reason detached from values, the route of technological ad-
vancement, or on values devoid of reason, the path of Euro-
pean nationalism (Edmund Husserl 180 ).
In Husserl’s view, philosophy was needed to clarify sci-
ence. What do we really mean by basic terms like thing, event,
consciousness?How do we attend to an object’s wholeness
while still being able to understand the object’s separate fea-
tures? The answers cannot be found by scientific experiment,
but rather must be sought through phenomenology, the study
of how things definitively appear to us. For Husserl, our shared
world is the real arena of study (Edmund Husserl 111 ). And,
Husserl adds, it is this world’s typical character that allows it to
be shared. Typification underlies the common possibility of
experience. For this reason, Husserl attends to the sameness,
the givenness or continuity, of experience. But he also notices
what interrupts such continuity: when self-consciousness,
wonder, or doubt arise suddenly and unexpectedly, throwing
us out of our usual complacency. Suddenly things look strange,
unaccountable. Only philosophical reflection can tell us about
such matters: insight cannot be found through research into
the structure of the brain or familiar platitudes about what life
is like.
Husserl is also intent on understanding what he calls the
foundational character of science. There is something about a
scientific discovery (for example, the revelation of Euclidean
geometry) that enables us to rely on it; the discipline created
by the discovery may be modified as time goes on, but always
From Algeria to the École Normale 39