Lev Shestov - Potestas Clavium - Part III

     Here are the three principal theses on which Husserl bases his rationalism. First of all, every theory which admits statements destroying the possibility of any theories whatsoever is absurd. This thesis, which was transmitted to Husserl by the ancient tradition and which all the theorists of knowledge consider indisputable, serves him to refute the present theories of knowledge.

     The second principle is not new either: a rigorous distinction between the points of view of psychology and theory of knowledge. As I have already said, this principle was proclaimed by the neo-Kantians to justify Kant's doctrine that reason dictates its laws to nature. What pertains here especially to Husserl is the rigor and boldness with which he develops and applies this principle, a rigor and boldness that distinguish all the works of this remarkable figure. Even though he gave to the second volume of his Logische Untersuchungen the title "Untersuchungen zur Phanomenologie und Theorie den Erkenntnis," he proposes finally to rid himself of all theory in the strict sense of the word. In a note on the expression "theory of abstraction," which he had himself used, he declares: "the word theory does not fit completely here, for what follows in the text does not give any place to theoretical construction, i.e., to explanation." One could then perhaps say that his theory of knowledge tries to put an end to every theory of knowledge. His success would have been the supreme triumph of rationalism, for it would then have appeared that reason has no need of being justified but, on the contrary, can itself justify everything. Husserl saw correctly; it is precisely thus that the problem of the theory of knowledge must be posed. It is because of this that he defends his first principle with such ardor and applies it so boldly.

     It is for the same reason also that he insists on the reality of ideal objects, a reality which appears evident in direct intuition, and introduces these objects into the same category as real objects, for both have being and exist. If his "arguments" are really irrefutable, Husserl can consider his work finished. Psychologism will forever have to abandon the domain of philosophy where, henceforth, absolute truths will reign. Science could then go forward in all tranquility without fear of an attack from the flank. All its judgments will be definitive and unalterable. No other court will be able to set itself above it. Everything will be according to its decisions: Roma locuta, causa finita.

     I repeat, we must do justice to Husserl. No other theory of knowledge poses the problem with such rigor, clarity, and frankness. Husserl will accept no compromise: all or nothing. Either evidence is the final goal to which human thought tends when it seeks the truth and this evidence can be obtained by human methods, or the reign of chaos and madness will be established on earth and it will be permitted to anyone who has the whim to seize the rights of reason, its scepter and its crown. And then "truth" will no longer have anything in common with the unshakable deductions which the exact sciences have sought and obtained until now. Then it would perhaps be necessary to recall with a certain gratitude the immature "wisdom" that Husserl had set aside, perhaps even alchemy and astrology. These were not sciences, of course, but constructions of a more or less scientific appearance which relied on argumentation. One would perhaps even come to the point of thinking back longingly about Catholic theology: Saint Thomas Aquinas, whatever else he was, was a faithful disciple of Aristotle.

     Let us, however, examine a little more closely Husserl's "argumentation."

     I have put the word "argumentation" in quotation marks because Husserl, who pretends to rely only on intuition and self-evidence, tries to pose the problem in such a way that every demonstration becomes superfluous. He leaves to other sciences the concern for Erklärungen, but the task of phenomenology is beyond all demonstrations. His concern is not das Erklären, but das Aufklären (Logische Untersuchungen, II, p.120). Such is the axiom: every theory which denies the possibilities of any theory whatsoever is absurd and, therefore, unacceptable. As Aristotle says, such theories refute themselves.

     Setting out from this, Husserl, as we recall, overthrows the specific relativism he had discovered in the theories of knowledge of Sigwart, Erdmann, Mill, etc. But is this thesis really indisputable? If we admit that our truth is only a human truth, do we really introduce into our reasonings an element which ruins them and takes away all their meaning?

     At first blush, this seems indisputably so. It is not for nothing that Greek thought has dominated men's minds for centuries. And then there is the evidence on which Husserl relies: we establish directly that a statement which conceals its own negation is absurd.

     But from another side an extremely strange fact solicits our attention. Despite all the efforts that have been made to expel that unfortunate relativism, it continues to live in philosophy, and its power of action and contagion after thousands of years of continuously vagabond and hunted existence not only has not weakened but, on the contrary, grown stronger. Husserl himself establishes that the most conscientious and penetrating thinkers, without taking account of the aquae et ignis interdictio [banishment] which threatens it, not only maintain constant relationships with this inveterate sinner but even render homage to it and honor it. How explain this mystery? Why have the frightening curses of reason not been effective? Why does Husserl see himself again obliged to raise his voice and to hurl his anathema at the philosophical community in the person of its most remarkable and most loyal representatives? Husserl does not raise this question and, moreover, cannot raise it. The very nature of his philosophical tendencies forbids him to take reality and history into consideration and treat them as independent factors. For one who admits the primacy of autonomous reason, reality always recedes into the background. He is persuaded in advance that every fact must necessarily find its place marked out in the thought which possesses all the purity of the a priori. Wir werden uns nicht zu der Uberzeugung entschliessen, es sei psychologisch möglich, was logisch und geometrisch widersinnig ist. [We will not commit ourselves to the proposition that that which is logically and geometrically absurd is psychologically possible] (Ibid., II, p. 215).

     One cannot fight against Husserl if one remains on his ground. You will hardly have opened your mouth to answer him before he immediately stops you: if you admit a thesis that denies the possibility of all theses, you speak words devoid of meaning and must withdraw your word.

     But let us make an experiment. In a general way Husserl avoids metaphysics, that is, he does not like it and is not interested in it. But he is prepared to examine carefully any metaphysical ideas whatsoever on the condition that they are presented to him not as "rigorous scientific truths" but as hypothetical suppositions and on the condition also that they do not contain any inner contradiction.

     Let us then make one of those suppositions which came to Descartes' mind and which, though inadmissible for certain other metaphysical considerations, are nevertheless possible. Let us assume that God can deceive men and that He does in fact deceive them. As Descartes has demonstrated to us, we see clearly that in order to be able to deceive us, God must somehow bring it about that we exist and that we even know the truth of our existence. But then after having granted to us, even if against His will, this unique truth - for otherwise it would have been impossible to deceive us - God can perfectly well deceive us about everything else and make us believe that our other truths are as indisputable as the truth of our existence. Descartes is perhaps right in rejecting with indignation the idea that God, who is perfection Himself and the supreme good, is capable of duping men. But it may also be that Descartes is wrong. Despite his great genius, the father of modern rationalism could have been insufficiently informed about the designs of Providence. And then, in any case, in supposing that God is truthful, Descartes makes a purely metaphysical assumption on which Husserl's theory, which is purely a priori and relies on evidence, has no right to lean. It is possible, then, that God deceives us about everything except about our own existence. It may then be that other beings exist - angels or gods - whom no one deceives and who see the real truth. What then? From the point of view of these beings, the human truth will be a specific truth - useful and necessary (perhaps, on the contrary, hurtful and bad) for men but inapplicable in other worlds. It is said that we cannot imagine any consciousness other than our own, but this is not true at all.

     As if it were not enough for nature to deceive us, but as if it wished expressly also to make us sadly suspect the deception, nature itself plunges us from time to time into states whose "evidence" is very different from that which serves as the basis for Husserl's theory of knowledge. Let us recall the state of drunkenness, the action of morphine and opium; let us recall ecstasy and finally the so-called "normal" state of sleeping which alternates regularly with the state of waking. Compared to the man who is awake, the man who is asleep can be considered as a being from another world. The sleeper has his own reality which is quite different from daily reality. He even has - and this is particularly important for us - his own logic and his own a priori, a logic and a priori which have nothing in common with the relative truths accepted by relativists like Sigwart and Mill. And this logic also rests on evidence. If a man dreams that he is the Emperor of China and that in this character he is engraving monograms on the surface of a sphere with one dimension only (dreams constantly offer examples of reality of this kind), the dreamer does not at all experience the contradictoriness of the elements out of which his representations and judgments are composed. On the contrary - and this happens constantly in dreams, as everyone knows from his own experience - when suddenly the sleeper begins to doubt that one can engrave monograms on a surface with one dimension, or that a man born in Russia or England and not knowing a word of Chinese can be Emperor of China, when, in a word, the memory of a "truth" strange to the universe of the dreamer tries to disturb the "natural" and "normal" march of the thoughts immanent in the latter, the logic of dreams immediately intervenes. It imposes its rights upon us and with indisputable evidence leads us to the conviction that all these memories are only the effect of an inveterate relativism, for, as appears clearly to the dreamer, the Emperor of China can never be a Chinese and monograms must necessarily be engraved on the surface of a one-dimensional sphere.

     In short, the "evidence" which conquers doubts, the "evidence" which pretends to be the supreme court and leads the thought of the dreamer according to its desires, plays the same role in dreams as in the state of waking.[1] And, then, it often happens that in dreaming we begin suddenly to feel that the events which unroll before us are false, that they are only the product of our imagination, that we are sleeping, and that to deliver ourselves from this network of falsehoods and of absurd a priori which ensnare us, we must awake. In other words, in the state of dreaming, among the truths which are true only for the species homo dormiens there suddenly emerge two truths that are no longer specific but absolute. If we reason in the dream state as Husserl and the Greeks reason, we shall have to reject precisely these two truths as containing an inner contradiction. If we say that we are sleeping and that our evidence is the evidence of a sleeper, i.e., a deceptive evidence, the statement that we are sleeping is also false. Homo dormiens, in relativizing the truth of his dream, relativizes being, etc. But this conviction which has arisen in us that we are sleeping and that we must awake in order to obtain the truth, these judgments that relativize the truth of our dreams, are the only ones that are true, and this is even too little to say, for they are the only ones that permit us to rid ourselves of the absurd and outrageous falsehoods of the state of dreaming.

[1] Cf. the end of Tolstoy's Confession: "And then, as often happens in dreaming, the mechanism by which I maintain myself seems natural, understandable and indisputable, though in the waking state it is absurd."