work turns away from Dasein, and in mood of increasing hostility to Christi-
anity, looks directly for a way in which Being “speaks to us.” His search for
the meaning of being in history takes on the appearance of seeking a new
eschatology, of the possibility of God appearing again in the world.^45 Even in
its failure, Heidegger’s ontological project gave a new attention center and set
of problems for the intellectual world. His Dasein analysis, designed merely as
entry point to the general question of being, became a defining point for the
burgeoning movement of existentialist theology and psychology. Late in the
century his historicizing, shorn of its ontology and its eschatological overtones,
became a favorite text for postmodernists. Heidegger also provided the way
for one more grand attempt on the core territory of ontology; in the hands of
Sartre, the inability to found being in general is turned into the central point
of a system in which being is characterized by its negativity, its lack of
foundation.
Husserl’s phenomenology, like any successful movement, divides into op-
posing tendencies. Somewhat like Kant in his later years, Husserl was in part
swept up in the movement he had spawned, in part appalled by the directions
in which it was going. Husserl saw his own earlier formalism, his own search
for rigorously scientific foundations, as typical of the pathological conscious-
ness emerging within modern history. He declared that phenomenology must
proceed by the “suspension of the presupposition of objectivity” (Roberts,
1972: 209); he was now an enemy of the scientism which he saw as the
hallmark of the age, and which was becoming famous in the manifestos of the
Vienna Circle. He took on an apocalyptic tone; the topic of his last work, The
Crisis of the European Sciences, is equated in a 1935 lecture with “The Crisis
of European Man.” Crisis had been Husserl’s stock-in-trade all his life. Now
the foundational crisis of mathematics since the 1880s had been replaced in
Husserl’s perception by a crisis arising from the impersonality of scientism—the
triumph of the natural attitude over the realm of eternal truths. At the same
time, Husserl attacked in the other direction, against irrationalism—all too
obvious in the ideology of the victorious Nazis—and against his protégé
Heidegger: “The downfall of Europe is its estrangement from its own rational
sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity” (quoted
in Natanson, 1973: 145).
But the Nazis were not primarily an intellectual movement at all, and their
rise to power was based on geopolitical and economic crises that had nothing
to do with philosophy. This did not prevent virtually every intellectual move-
ment of the 1930s and for several decades thereafter from blaming their
intellectual rivals for Nazism, as the alleged result of failing to adopt the proper
premises, whether those of Marxism, logical positivism, ordinary language,
Popper’s fallibilism, existentialism, or phenomenology. The intellectual crisis750 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths