objectively true, and the ready-made opinions and prejudices
of “the whole modern age” ( 169 ). Husserl calls upon science as
the cure for the easy, half-plausible doctrines of contemporary
politics.
Husserl, then, enlists mathematical objectivity as a po-
tentially saving counter to the myths and lies of the 1930 s,
Auden’s “low dishonest decade.” He fervently hopes that a new
attention to the kind of lucidity and standards of evidence that
mathematical science requires will reform the public realm. As
geometry once leapt out of a merely factual context, giving ex-
perience a new dimension, so it may once again change our
understanding of the world around us.
In the “Origin of Geometry,” as in his Vienna lecture
( 1935 ) and his Crisis of the European Sciences( 1936 ), Husserl
implicitly relies on Plato’s sense that there is a vast difference
between the world of the ideas (which mathematics helps us
perceive, according to Plato) and our everyday shifting uni-
verse of opinion, emotion, and unreliable narrative. But he
also draws from Plato the notion that attention to the ideas can
purify the everyday, enabling us to see it truly, as if for the first
time. The ideas bring us out of the cave into the accurate light
of reality.
As in “Genesis and Structure,” Derrida in his introduc-
tion to Husserl emphasizes Husserl’s sense that geometry had
a beginning. Geometrical objects did not exist prior to the dis-
covery of the discipline. Yet the particulars of history cannot
explain this beginning. If we knew the names and biographies
of those who invented geometry, we would learn little about
what the founding of geometry was like, or what it meant. In-
stead, these merely factual circumstances would miss the
point. (In this sense geometry is fundamentally unlike psycho-
46 From Algeria to the École Normale