Rosemary R. P. Lerner^[2]

Abstract

Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy represents the last significant Western attempt to provide a coherent and systematic philosophical foundation to all human achievements endowed with meaning and validity, spanning the entire spectrum of sciences and cultural disciplines. This effort is tantamount to a disavowal of the Modern foundational project and a revolutionary attempt to redefine the Platonic sense of philosophy as ἐπιστήμη. His project restores a holistic sense of rationality beyond any ontological-epistemological dichotomy, in which the concept of life—in its highest incarnation as sense-endowing self-consciousness—occupies the center stage. The A. claims that Husserl’s phenomenological method and core metaphysical insights foreshadow a developing scientific paradigm—“the systems view of life”—that is currently displacing the dualistic and mechanistic paradigm that has dominated Western sciences and philosophy since Descartes and Newton. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a “scientific philosophy” thus provides positive sciences and cultural endeavors with a “unified vision” and “ultimate foundations.” In so doing, it does not become naturalized” Instead, it phenomenologizes” them.

    

Keywords: transcendental phenomenology; scientific paradigms; metaphysics; teleology; life philosophy.

Resumen

La filosofía fenomenológica de Husserl representa el último intento significativo en Occidente para proveer de una fundación filosófica coherente y sistemática a toda actividad humana dotada de sentido y validez, incluyendo el espectro entero de las ciencias y disciplinas culturales. Este esfuerzo equivale a una revocación del proyecto fundacional moderno y a un intento revolucionario de replantear el sentido platónico de filosofía como ἐπιστήμη. Su proyecto restaura un sentido holístico de racionalidad allende todo dualismo ontológico-epistemológico, en el que el concepto de vida –desde su más alta manifestación como autoconsciencia dadora de sentido– ostenta el papel principal. La A. sostiene que el método fenomenológico husserliano y sus principales ideas metafísicas anticipan el desarrollo de un nuevo paradigma científico –la “visión sistémica de la vida”– que actualmente viene desplazando al paradigma mecanicista y dualista que impera en Occidente desde Descartes y Newton. La fenomenología trascendental husserliana como una “filosofía científica” otorga así una “visión unificada” y “últimos fundamentos” a las ciencias positivas y obras culturales. Al hacerlo, no se ve “naturalizada”. Por el contrario, ella las “fenomenologiza”.

   

Palabras clave: fenomenología trascendental; paradigmas científicos; metafísica; teleología; filosofía de la vida.

§ 1. Transcendental phenomenology anticipates the “Systems View of Life”

Husserl’s concept of “philosophy as a rigorous science” has been grossly misinterpreted. In the past decades, a “new” and/or “other” Husserl has emerged in the minds of interpreters and been appraised as the true one. It is contended that he has always been the “same”—the scientifically-oriented logocentric theoretician initially identified, and the newly discovered “existential-holistic,” lifeworld-ethical, axiologically-oriented philosopher. Those that insist in this last version and in the “unity” and consistency of Husserl’s thought, paradoxically have tended to misunderstand the very meaning of Husserl’s revolutionary sense of a scientific philosophy. They may even dismiss it as an “external horizon” in his phenomenology,^[3] misinterpreted perhaps as a nod to current natural sciences branded in the sense of a “naturalization of phenomenology.” The modern and positivist sense of the term science is so inextricably rooted in Western minds, that there is great difficulty in understanding Husserl’s essentially radical distinction between any positive objectively-oriented science or discipline, and his view of phenomenology as a “rigorous science.” The fact that phenomenology is also interested in focusing the primal sources of the sense and validity of natural sciences—as of any other sense and validity whatsoever—may have been erroneously understood as “naturalizing” phenomenology. In fact, it is wholly the reverse. Philosophy as a rigorous science is a wholly unprecedented concept of philosophy. Descartes’ sense of a scientific philosophy emulates the purely theoretical “analytic-synthetic” mathematical paradigm, and radically differs with Husserl’s notion. The latter has a narrower kinship with Plato’s sense of ἐπιστήμη and with the intertwinement among the different spheres of rationality. But Husserl’s Platonic inspiration did not bear any sharp ontological dualism that also characterized mutatis mutandis Descartes’ and Kant’s proposals, many centuries later.

Consequently, it is my belief that Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy as “the ideal” of a “unique authentic science in the highest sense of the word” (Hua XXXII: 17)^[4] represents the last serious Western effort to provide a “philosophical system” and a unified account for every human achievement endowed with sense and validity, a system in which the concept of life—from the vantage point of its highest manifestation as self-consciousness—has the leading role. Husserl himself asserted: “[…] my phenomenology actually has within its field of view all questions that can be put to man in the concrete, including as well all so-called metaphysical questions, insofar as they have possible sense in the first place, for it is their original formulation and critical delimitation, which is precisely the vocation of this phenomenology” (Hua V: 141 [408]; my italics). To clarify my point, I will compare some salient aspects of Husserl’s methodology and core metaphysical insights—that have become clearer since the 2013 publication of Hua XLII—with elements of a newly emerging scientific paradigm that Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi^[5] have christened as “the systems view of life” in their book bearing the same title (2014). Allegedly, this new theoretical framework is currently manifested in the most advanced social and scientific investigations as a “unifying vision” that succeeds in overcoming the dualistic and mechanistic paradigm that has prevailed in Western sciences and philosophy since Modern times.

Thus, my purpose in this occasion is to roughly outline why I deem that Husserl’s philosophical phenomenology not only anticipates but is also more compatible with this new “unifying vision” than other current philosophical proposals, and thus able to provide it with a more consistent philosophical framework.^[6]

In what follows, a tightened version of some arguments that I have been developing for some time in a still ongoing research is set forth. It is not unconnected to the different versions of Lebensphilosophien that emerged at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. These different Lebensphilosophien—that tacitly remained at the background of the ensuing divide between Continental and Analytic philosophers, reawakened around 1980 with the debate between the emergent cognitive sciences and a “naturalized” version of phenomenology. My interest today is to recast the aforementioned debate within a much wider context: that of a new and universal systemic scientific paradigm that is currently deeply challenging the traditional Western “hiatus” between the contingency of life and history, on the one side, and the determinism and necessity of Newtonian physics, on the other (Prigogine 1994 a: 39). By tagging the elements in Husserl’s work that I find consistent with the systems view of life, I will attempt to show in which sense I believe that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology—as an Arbeitsphilosophie, upon which he attempts to build his “ideal” of a scientifically rigorous philosophy “from below” (Hua XXV: 42 [121–122])—is the most suited to provide a philosophical framework to this new cultural paradigm. To be sure, there are still some important inconsistencies and relevant limitations that have to be sorted out, in order that my point may prove to be fully grounded.

To Husserlian phenomenologists, I mainly offer here some salient elements of the “systems view of life,” the pillars of which are the result of advanced research in physics, biochemistry, and dynamic systems theories. Thereupon, and more briefly, I attempt to connect these elements with my general view of Husserl’s philosophical project, highlighting some of its relevant aspects that I believe are in accordance with the new systemic paradigm. I finally indicate some of the difficulties that still have to be worked out.

§ 2. From 20th century Lebensphilosophien to cognitive sciences and the “naturalization of phenomenology”

Both from a scientific and philosophical perspective, at least since the 19th century, the notion of “life” is of paramount significance for the genesis of the aforementioned paradigm shift. Yet the “cultural divide” or “hiatus” between the naturalistically-oriented Lebensphilosophien, on the one side, and the humanistic-oriented ones, on the other, gave rise to different traditions that scarcely engaged in mutual dialogue nor tolerated interdisciplinary research. However, both Dilthey and Bergson, but more explicitly Husserl, Bachelard, and later on Merleau-Ponty and Foucault, did highlight the natural roots of life’s spiritual dimension. Husserl’s philosophy was specially caught in the crossfire of both traditions, since both dismissed his work as fostering a skeptic subjectivism and/or egocentric solipsistic relativism. The defenders of the human sciences rejected his alleged objectifying and logocentric “scientism,” whereas the advocates of the “natural” sciences rebuked his so-called “anti-naturalism.” The former highlighted his contribution to cultural, historical, and moral issues; the latter emphasized some of his intuitions in the formal sciences. Husserl, until the end, was adamant that “positivism, in a manner of speaking, decapitates philosophy,” having “nothing to say to us” regarding the most pressing metaphysical and ethical problems (Hua VI: 4, 7 [9, 12]). By stressing that these could only be dealt with, by referring them to “the enigma of subjectivity,” he gave rise to attacks from both traditions. Only few understood that in his view: “to recognize that naturalism is a failed philosophy by reasons of principle does not mean to abandon the idea of a rigorously scientific philosophy, a ‘philosophy from the ground up’” (Hua XXV: 41 [121–122]).

Since the birth of “cognitive sciences” some 45 years ago—with the contributions of biologists such as Gregory Bateson, on the one side, and the Chileans Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, founders of the “Santiago cognitive theory”—, on the other, the Cartesian concept of mind as a res or substance was finally abandoned (Maturana & Varela 1987). It started to be dealt with as a process, characterized in terms of organized patterns and relations, common to every living organism (Capra & Luisi 2014: 253).^[7] Soon, cognitive sciences combined the work of biologists, with that of psychologists, and epistemologists—to which the contribution of quantum physicists, chemists, and of the nonlinear interpretation of neuronal networks were soon added. To be sure, initially the human mind was modeled after cybernetics. Hubert Dreyfus’s merit was to single out Føllesdal^[8] as having called out Husserl’s early contribution to cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind with his version of intentionality (Føllesdal 1958). At the same time, Dreyfus deemed that Husserl anticipated and replicated artificial intelligence (Dreyfus & Hall 1984: 17–27) but that the latter, in his view, was unable to reproduce the functions and capacities of human minds (Dreyfus 1972, 1986, 1992). He decided thus to introduce Husserl to analytic philosophers and cognitive scientists, assimilating his work to theirs. As a pragmatist phenomenologist, Dreyfus considered the work of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as offering better elements to prove his argument against artificial intelligence.

Since then, cognitive sciences slowly introduced first-person experiences within the framework of their research, whereby the “enactivist” approach to human experiences began to develop. As aforementioned, cognition ceased to be conceived as the mere possession of mental representations of a pre-given world, but was rather understood since then as the active interaction (“enaction”) of the embodied mind with its natural and social environment, whereby the mind constitutes itself while simultaneously constitutes (or “brings forward”) a meaningful world (Varela, Thompson, Rosch 1991). I reckon that Husserl began to be mentioned as a philosopher of interest, when the biologist Varela proposed the term “neurophenomenology” —under the influence of the young French phenomenologist Natalie Depraz— as the discipline called upon to solve David Chalmers’ “hard cognitive problem” (Varela 1996; Chalmers 1995), which referred to the emergence of self-consciousness. Soon, this research fell under the misleading call to “naturalize phenomenology” (Petitot, Varela, Pachoud, & Roy 1999). However, as Zahavi reported, the four editors of Naturalizing Phenomenology conceived their project as laying bare the possible limitations and insufficiencies of the concept of “naturalization” (2017: 163).

Most revealing of all, however, is perhaps a reply given by Varela to a question that I posed to him at a meeting in Paris in 2000. The volume Naturalizing Phenomenology was only intended as the first part of a larger project. The second, complementary volume, which unfortunately was never realized due to Varela’s untimely death, was planned to carry the title Phenomenologizing Natural Science (Zahavi 2017: 164).

Thus, they had begun to understand that there was no need to oppose a sound and newly understood “naturalism” to a “transcendental” perspective.

Indeed, decisive advances in theoretical physics since the beginning of the 20th century drastically transformed the understanding of objectivity, subjectivity, and knowledge. A striking early exponent was Herman Weyl —a mathematician, theoretical physicist, and Einstein’s colleague— whose work on the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics was influenced by Husserl’s transcendental idealism (Weyl 1919: 2–4; Zahavi 2017: 168; Ryckman 2005: 225). Recently, the neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher Thomas Fuchs (2018) is developing his work under Husserl’s influence, emphasizing the role of embodiment, enactivism, temporality, and intersubjectivity.^[9]

Capra and Luisi, authors of The Systems View of Life (2014) dedicate their book to Varela’s groundbreaking work; however, they are only indirectly and barely—though respectfully—aware of Husserl’s work. Their research—starting with their own expertise as theoretical physicists, dynamic systems theorists, and biochemists—has matured during four decades, enriched by multifarious scientific groundbreaking research in biochemistry, physics, mathematics, dynamic systems theory, ecology, psychology, anthropology, cognitive sciences, medical sciences, and social and political sciences. But why should these widespread groundbreaking investigations be characterized as a “paradigm shift” in sciences and culture, and be labeled as “the systems view of life?” In their view, it is because in all of those fronts of science and culture a “perceptive shift from physics to the life sciences” became increasingly manifest (Capra & Luisi 2014: 15). In my view, this perceptive shift squares well with Husserl’s idea of a radical (transcendental)—and open-ended—philosophical foundation, not only of natural sciences but also of every human achievement endowed with meaning and validity.

§ 3. Perceptive shifts and scientific revolutions

The term “paradigm shift” stems from Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn himself was Popper’s pupil, and was influenced by J. Piaget, A. Koyré (who followed Husserl’s courses in Göttingen), W. v. O. Quine, among others. A “scientific paradigm” in his view is the ensemble of “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners” (1970: viii, 1). “Normal science”—in Kuhn’s terminology—develops its theories, methods and research within the framework of the established paradigm, and is found condensed in textbooks (1970: Chap. V, VII, and VIII). Furthermore, in Kuhn’s view, science does not evolve by accumulation in an endless progress, but is subject to shifts, changes, evolutions, and a succession of different theories, schools, and experimental observations, often incommensurable among themselves (1970: Chap. IX and X). When anomalies start to pile up in ongoing research within any given paradigm, they are initially not acknowledged by the scientific establishment, yet they slowly give way to “extraordinary investigations” carried out by bold (usually younger) scientists (1970: Chap. VI). Varied foundation crises ensue, until a concurrent “theory” slowly emerges, whereby not only the different disciplines change their perspectives, but also nature itself is redefined. The proponents of these “scientific revolutions” are oblivious to their existence, or of their historicity (1970: Chap. XI).

Kuhn, and later Capra and Luisi—among many others, following Husserl’s earlier yet unnoticed forebodings—have perceived that the Cartesian epistemological paradigm, and Newton’s mathematical, deterministic, and technicist paradigm exhibit signs of crises since the 19th century. The history of science shows that these crises first showed up in all of the natural and social life-sciences (biology, chemistry, psychology, linguistics, history, art, economy, sociology), and in philosophy. But it also shows that it emerged in chemistry and thermodynamics as well. These, as natural sciences, were not supposed to contradict the “mechanistic, physicalist, objectivistic, and linear” Newtonian paradigm. The increasing anomalies and crises that followed finally caught up with physics, giving rise to a “perceptual shift from physics to the life sciences.”

One of the pillars of modern time’s physicalist paradigm was Newton’s concept of “reversible time,” at the basis of the alleged causal determinism and predictability of the laws of nature. But the increasing anomalies that usual research in “normal science” encountered, seemed to weaken its universal application and predictability. These anomalies popped up in Lamarck’s and Darwin’s theories of evolution, in biological and genetic research, in thermodynamics (with the reformulation of its second law, or entropy), in the study of electromagnetic phenomena and forces, and in social sciences and economy. During the 1920’s, Quantum Theory shattered the Newtonian notion of a physical world made up of small material independent units. The subatomic world emerged as a complex network of interconnections, whereby the “elements” appeared as “interconnections” of further subsystems. The so-called “new physics” combined in a “complete quantum theory” Einstein’s discoveries regarding special and general relativity. Regarding this new “scientific revolution” the words of the 1977 Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine^[10] were particularly harsh. He claimed that “after 1960” the universal application of Newton’s mechanics and its laws of movement “proved to be incorrect” (Prigogine 1994a: 40). For example, his research and contributions regarding the second law of thermodynamics—(or “entropy”)—revealed that the irreversibility of time is not a subjective “illusion”—as Einstein still believed—and that it is operative everywhere in the universe: not only producing disorder, but unpredictable new “orders.”^[11] He had previously stated that if “for every billion thermal photons in disorder, there is one elementary particle supposed to be able to transmit ordered structures,” then not only in the biological but also in the physical universe “novelties,” “new spatial-temporal organizations” emerge; “the universe has a history,” and time has a “creative role.” In this context, “equations become nonlinear” for they admit “more than one solution” (Prigogine 1989: 398–399).

Other scientists, such as MIT professor Evelyn F. Keller^[12] (not a phenomenologist!), suggested since 1994 the need to overturn science’s objectivist approach, for Newton’s physicalist paradigm and its upshot—the “objectified” image of subjectivity that ensues from it—is precisely constituted by “subjects,” whereby the role of subjectivity must be recast (Keller 1994: 143–173).

§ 4. The “Systems View of Life”

The slow emergence of the systemic paradigm has taken up a large part of the 20th century, coexisting almost until its last decades with elements of the previous mechanistic paradigm. According to Capra and Luisi it began towards the end of the 19th century, in different domains—in Gestalt psychology, biology, the nascent ecology, and quantum physics.^[13] Though unknown to Capra and Luisi, in my view, Husserl’s contributions to genetic phenomenology and generative problems square well with this “silent revolution” from automata to organisms since the beginning of the 20th century.

Parts began to be examined from “wholes” in biology, rather than to explain the latter in linear causal sequences from their various parts, as was the case for most of the twentieth century (the “century of the gene”), and is still the case today.^[14] Schrödinger still believed in 1944 that life’s stability was due to the fact that it worked as a “well-built clock” (Prigogine 1994a: 46). Thus, the life sciences gradually began to approach living systems “from the wholes to the parts.”^[15] Following a “downward causation,” ecosystems were investigated as containing social systems, which were treated as including organisms, which are composed of organs; from organs, scientists continued to look lower to tissues, cells, biotic, and prebiotic chemicals. This method eventually led to the “molecular soup,” and then to the atomic and subatomic realms (Capra & Luisi 2014: 157).

Studies revealed two opposite tendencies at each living systemic level: an “integrative” one towards more complex systems, a “self-assertive” and “self-organizing” one, in charge of preserving the individual autonomy of subsystems (Capra & Luisi 2014: 13, 65, passim). Each higher level of organized complexity began to be described with the notions of emergent properties and interconnectedness of the parts from the whole. In ecology, living systems started to be understood as interacting with their Umwelt (environment), as networks of networks within the web of life (Capra 1996).

Since the development of “quantum theory” by an international team led by Niels Bohr^[16] in the 1920s, the “new physics”^[17] took its first definite steps. However, as its research began to contribute to the knowledge of living organisms and their molecular elements, this “new physics” first integrated and cemented the “systems view of life.”

Some of the novel notions of the emergent physical paradigm are the following: First, the “uncertainty principle” quantitatively expresses the “limits of our intuitive capacities” and human imagination to comprehend the subatomic universe (Heisenberg 1958). Second, the “intrinsic” properties of elementary particles depend on the “experimental context” and on “the observer’s mind:” “The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole” (Heisenberg 1958: 107; Capra & Luisi 2014: 72). Thereby “the whole determines the part” (Heisenberg 1969). Third, a new notion of “causality” emerges. No linear determinism is detected at the quantum level. Fourth, the observer (the “subject’s”) role is not limited to “measuring phenomena;” it also intervenes in their production: “What we observe is not nature itself, but rather nature exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisenberg 1958: 58). Fifth, “matter” exhibits a “dynamic” and “restless” character, for “mass” is only a “form” or “bundle” of “energy” that changes into other forms of energy, etc. Summing up, the laws of nature pertaining to this “new physics” involve a “perceptual shift:” from parts to wholes; from atomism to interconnectivity; from objects to relations; from measures to mappings; from quantities to qualities; from structures to processes; from causal determinism to patterns of probability; and from causality to statistics (Capra & Luisi 2014: 80–83 passim).

All of these characteristics reverberate in Husserl’s transcendental turn, both in his warning regarding the “forgotten foundation of objective sciences in the lifeworld,” and in the evidence of intuition—despite its finiteness—as phenomenology’s “principle of principles,” upon which the infinite mathematical and symbolic worlds are built.

“Nonlinearity” and “complexity”—core notions of the systems view of life—are recent developments of the classical systems theories and cybernetics (developed between 1940–1970). Husserl, who died in 1938, could not have predicted them. Besides its holistic view, another essential concept of this new paradigm is the “feedback loop pattern” developed by Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and Alan Turing, among others, which consists of:

A circular arrangement of causally connected elements, in which an initial cause propagates around the links of the loop, so that each element has an effect on the next, until the last “feeds back” the effect into the first element of the cycle […]. The consequence of this arrangement is that the first link (“input”) is affected by the last (“output”), resulting in self-regulation of the entire system, as the initial effect is modified each time it travels around the cycle (Capra & Luisi: 89–90).

Nonlinearity also stems from biology, alongside the notion of self-organization. Scientists finally acknowledge since 1970 that nature is “relentlessly nonlinear” (Capra & Luisi 2014: 105), and that small causes may produce dramatic effects, giving rise to initial instabilities at the origin of new forms of self-organization: “nature at large turns out to be more like human nature—unpredictable, sensitive to the surrounding world, and influenced by small fluctuations” (Capra & Luisi 2014: 180). Each living organism, from the first cell to human beings, is a “bounded system” with an “inside world” (self) that “maintains its individuality” vis à vis its surrounding “outside world” through a “semipermeable membrane” whereby it absorbs nutrients and energy and expels its wastes (cognition). Thus, each organism is an “operationally closed” yet “thermodynamically open system,” sustaining and regenerating itself while interacting in an “input/output” “structural coupling” with the environment (Capra & Luisi 2014: 134–138). Hence, life is a “non-localized” emergent “global property” that cannot be reduced to, or found in any of its parts (Capra & Luisi 2014: 132–133).^[18] The biologists Maturana and Varela named the “internal” self-maintaining and self-organizing process that “coincides with the individual life-span:” autopoiesis; and the second process of “interaction” with the “external” surroundings: cognition—a process that not only affects the organism’s inner autopoietic processes, but also transforms the organism’s outer surroundings.

Capra and Luisi believe that this pattern not only applies from cells to the more complex forms of natural life, but that it is legitimate to extend it to the higher forms of communal life (social, economic, historic, etc.)—albeit in a certain symbolic way—(Capra & Luisi 2014: chaps. 13–14).^[19] With death, the natural autopoietic organisms disintegrate, whereby their “molecular components are yielded back to the environment and used for other purposes” (Capra & Luisi 2014: 137). If life is an “emergent property” from the prebiotic world, then the mind is an emergent property of life. There is a long nonlinear evolution from the prebiotic molecules to the emergence of human cognition and self-consciousness. But the “upward causation” implied by the emergence of complex properties does not tell the whole story; Capra and Luisi show that the developed organism “determines” its organs and other components in a “downward causation,” and when it does. It is a complex upward-downward process whereby mutations occur due to deterministic factors intertwined with random, contingent, and unpredictable ones, describable only ex post with dynamic nonlinear tools. Ilya Prigogine held in 1989 that: “Today, as physics attempts to incorporate instability, the world we see outside us and the world we see within are converging. This convergence of two worlds is perhaps one of the important cultural events of our age” (398).

§ 5. Husserlian phenomenology: a look “from within”

Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, which develops as a “look from within” and sensu lato as in a “downward causation,” seems to me to be the last Western “philosophical system” that is compatible with the “systems view of life’s” new paradigm. Not only because it unfolds from “the primary nature of consciousness” (Bitbol, in Capra & Luisi: 266–268) and spirit as the highest level of life’s evolution, but also because it is the first and only instance from which the entire history of the universe, from the “Big Bang” or further back, acquires its intelligibility.^[20]

I have already alluded to Husserl’s estrangement from the Continental and Analytic traditions. One of the pervasive misunderstandings concerns transcendental phenomenology’s claim that, as “first philosophy” in the sense of an “ultimately founding science,” it provides an “ultimate foundation” to the entire universe of what is humanely cognizable or experienced. Since Aristotle and later Descartes, the notion of “foundation” has been solely associated with deductive-demonstrable inferences or “arguments,” in a broader sense. Husserl’s claim is indeed impossible with that sense of Begründung. But it is not what Husserl means here (Hua I: 178, 182 [152, 156]). A scientific and radical philosophy of ultimate foundations refers to something deeper and primal than mere positive sciences that exhibit inferential or calculative proofs. Indeed, a philosophy that, in “the words of Kant, ‘might come forth as a science’” (Hua V: 160 [427]) is a philosophy “based on ultimate self-responsibility” (Hua V: 139 [406]), whereby its ultimately “legitimizing source of cognition” is “everything originarily (so to speak, in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ […], but also only within […] <its> limits” (Hua III/1: 51 [44]). In other words, it is a philosophy that acknowledges that it “can only again draw its truth itself from originary data […] called upon to serve as a foundation, a principium in the genuine sense of the word” (Hua III/1: 51 [44]). Furthermore, these originary data do not constitute a complete or closed system of truths, but unfold as an “infinite historical process” (Hua V: 139 [406]) realizable by “generations of philosophers” in an intersubjective “spiritual community” (Hua VI: 274–275 [339–340]), as “humble workers” (Hua IX: 301 [179]). That is why, until this old age, Husserl considered himself “a genuine beginner” in the development of this task (Hua V: 161 [429]).

When Husserl designates “transcendental subjectivity” as the locus of philosophy’s “ultimate foundations,” he means by it “transcendental experiences”—namely, constitutive meaning-giving and validating functions (Leistungen) (Hua V: 139 [406]). Thus, the foundational domain is not a “real object within the world,” but complex processes that we put forth as responsible “subject[s] for this world” (Hua V: 146 [413]), subjects that are in intentional correlation with the world (in Maturana and Varela’s wide sense of cognition). The descriptions of psychological and transcendental subjects differ, yet paradoxically they belong to the same underlying subject (Kant 1974: B 155; Hua 6: §53),^[21] seen from different perspectives. Indeed, subjects not only experience the world, but also grasp themselves as worldly entities —as human beings, “rational animals,” “persons”—among other inner worldly entities. The “general thesis of the natural attitude” (Hua III/1: § 30)—that “the world is always there” (immer daseiende Welt), and that we are entities within it—is the underlying conviction of every other theoretical, practical, or valuing “position-taking” (Stellungsnahme). The ἐποχή strips subjectivity of its entitative character and unveils its underlying “universal a priori of correlation,” namely, intentionality (Hua III/1: §§ 31–32; Hua VI: § 46). Transcendental reduction—the “method of retrospective interrogation”—allows the “ascent from mundane subjectivity […] to ‘transcendental subjectivity,’” (Hua V: 140 [407]), namely, to purely lived first-person experiences. This method leads to intuitive descriptions of the eidetic structures, functions, and modes of transcendental experiences. Thus, both aspects of the method (transcendental reduction and eidetic descriptions) are deemed to ensure the universality of this new philosophical enterprise conceived as “first philosophy” and as the “indispensable precondition for any metaphysics and other sort of philosophy—‘that will be able to make its appearance as a science’” (Hua III/1: 8 [xxii]).

Indeed, Husserl considers “transcendental eidetic phenomenology” to be first philosophy—yet in the sense of an Arbeitsphilosophie. As such, he believes it is able to provide the “ultimate grounding,” origin, or “elementary grammar” upon which his “idea of philosophy” is to be built. In his view, one of the main upshots of its intentional or constitutive analyses and descriptions is a “universal theory of sciences” (Hua VII: 6 [6]), inspired by the Leibnizian ideal of a “genuine universal ontology,” as the systematic unity of all conceivable a priori sciences (formal and material), which in turn provide the positive (objective) foundations of all positive and factual sciences (Hua Dok III/VI: 206; Hua IX: 296–297 [175–176]). In this sense, Husserl’s “foundational” procedure tallies up with the systemic “downward causation” mentioned by the systems view of life and highlighted as “the primary nature of consciousness” (Bitbol in Capra & Luisi 2014: 266–268). As aforementioned, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology not only sets out from the highest and ultimate stage of life’s evolution, but from the sole and ultimate instance whereby the history of the universe, and everything that surrounds us, becomes intelligible.

Husserl’s static and especially genetic phenomenological descriptions of consciousness’ intentional structures and functions (especially intentionality and temporality) are not only compatible with the properties of autopoiesis and cognition that Maturana and Varela detected at the lowest levels of life, but also with Heisenberg’s assertion whereby “what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (1958: 58). Indeed, the intentional functions of transcendental life reveal themselves in first-person experiences within the dynamic process of the “universal synthesis of transcendental time” (Hua I: § 18). Thus conscious, active—theoretical, practical, and axiological—experiences are rooted in and/or stem from deeper (unconscious, passive, and associative) processes. The experiential unconscious, irrational, synthetic-associative background of conscious and rational life also manifests itself around a passive and pre-objectifying egological center “teleologically” connected to our conscious, rational, and active ego. The latter’s constitutive intentions are never “individual,” but integrate “intentional systems” that slowly configure a surrounding meaningful world (Hua I: §§ 30–33; Hua III/1: § 80; Hua IV: §§ 22–29, 50).

But this means that Husserl understands human subjects as embodied minds that develop onto- and phylogenetically (Hua XV: 595–596; Hua XXXIX: 653–666) in their organic bodies, interacting with the psycho-physical and cultural surrounding world. They also finally emerge as spiritual “persons” (in “communal activities”) (Hua IV: §§ 49 ff.), both synchronically and diachronically connected with the lives of other transcendental co-subjects with whom they constitute cultural traditions that are transmitted throughout the generations (Hua VI: App. III). Consequently, the “feedback loophole causality” that characterizes every living organism is also reflected in Husserl’s descriptions: 1. in the multifarious passive and active interactions of subjects with the “outer” surrounding world and with each other—as in cognition—; and, 2. in the self-organizing “inner” dynamics of transcendental life, which continuously feeds “secondary passivity” and in turn “motivates” new constitutions, their reactivation, and transformation (Hua VI: 380 [368–369])—as in autopoiesis.

Beyond transcendental phenomenology’s intuitive and descriptive limits, Husserl’s different views of metaphysics develop in two main directions. It first deploys as “second philosophy” and it deals with “[…] the irrationality of the transcendental factum,” the “irrational factum of the world’s rationality,” “history as the great factum of absolute being,” or the “factum of its historical-teleological world” (Hua VIII: 508). It also deals with other fortuitous facticities, such as death, destiny, the sense of history, etc. (Hua IX: 298–301 [176 –179]); Hua I: 39, 106, 181–182 [39, 72, 154–155]), but finally, and mainly, it deals with the “factum transcendental ego,” without which “the eidos transcendental ego is unthinkable” (Hua XV: 385 ff.). Hence, metaphysics as “second philosophy” deals with facticities that are presupposed by “first philosophy,” for “beyond them it has no scientific sense to search for others.” (Hua VII: 188 [194]) Indeed, our absolute reality or existence—characterized as “originary contingency” (Urzufälligem) “has in itself its foundation, and in its groundless being (grundlosen Sein) it has its absolute necessity” (Hua XV: 386). A second sense of metaphysics arises in the opposite direction altogether, upon the basis and guidelines of transcendental phenomenology but transcending its limits. It consists of “plausible metaphysical constructions” that “surpass the limits of transcendental phenomenological descriptions” (Hua XLII: xix) and “lead to the metaphysical ideas of God, freedom, immortality, etc.” (Hua Dok III/III: 410). These speculative constructions are founded upon the “first cartographical map” provided by the intuitive givennesses of Ideas I, in an infinite effort oriented towards the “highest and ultimate questions” that correspond to Kant’s postulates and the properly ethical problems dealt with by the great philosophers of the past.^[22]

These opposite senses of metaphysics—one presupposed by transcendental phenomenology, and the other postulated and devised upon its basis—have in Husserl’s view some relation to another set of problems at the frontiers of phenomenology (Grenzprobleme). These problems also stand in opposite directions, yet they are internally connected by the umbilical cord of a universal teleology that has “transcendental phenomenology” at its center (as the descriptive, eidetic ground of subjectivity’s structures and functions). On the one side, the problems of birth and death, wakefulness, sleep, “ultimate sleep,” instincts, unconsciousness, drives and instincts; on the other side, the questions regarding life’s origin and destiny, its finitude and its ultimate end (Hua XLII: Parts I & II). The former cannot be reached by “intuitive givennesses,” and thus are not describable. Husserl indicates they can only be accessed by deconstructing the eidetic description of intentional sense-giving and intuitive structures and functions. The latter are accessed by “plausible metaphysical constructions” built upon the firm grounds of the teleological structure of passive associations and active intentional cogitations.^[23]

Husserl’s 1908–1909 text on “Monadology” (Hua XLII: 137–153), echoing Leibniz’s multisubstantialist ontology and yet reinterpreted from the “first-person” perspective, already revealed how he viewed the connection of metaphysics and phenomenology. Most amazing for him was not only that consciousness connects us with the world, as every living organism is connected with its surroundings through cognition since the first stages of life’s development on earth. What amazed him most was rather that from our current flow of consciousness we can orient ourselves towards a past that “is no more,” that “once was,” including to a past where there was neither consciousness nor cognition, but only mountains and rivers, “without organic beings” (Hua XLII: 143). How can this be? How are we able to reach “that which is no more?” Is our mind still connected with our organic body when we do? How? etc. We thus read the past on the basis of what we perceive today, “nature is a necessary construction (and that is its essence) in current consciousness” (Hua XLII: 151).

§ 6. Pros and cons: a provisional balance

Besides the traits we have already pointed out (autopoiesis, cognition, “downward causation,” Heisenberg’s assertion whereby “what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (1958: 58), “feedback-loophole” causality) there are other aspects of Husserl’s philosophy that seem to me prima facie consistent with those put forward by the “systems view of life.” We summarize only a few:^[24]

1. Husserl’s aspiration to provide a universal and unifying account of all human productions endowed with sense and validity (both everyday achievements as well as scientific and cultural disciplines), beyond the hiatus in Western civilization since Descartes.
2. The notion of “transcendental subjectivity” or “transcendental experiences” (mind), understood as complex processes, not as a res.
3. His notion of natural factual sciences as providing “empirical laws,” not pure or exact laws, thus as “theoretically grounded probabilities” (Hua XVIII: 83 [52]; Prigogine 1997: 189), rejecting the Newtonian linear causal determinism and “objectivism.” As a corollary: the conviction that every epistemic demand does not exclude “the conceivability that what is evident could subsequently become doubtful,” which “can always be recognized in advance by critical reflection on what the evidence in question does” (Hua I: 56 [15]).
4. The description of transcendental, embodied, intentional, and temporal subjectivity as a living monad that not only transforms itself—organizes and constitutes itself (autopoiesis)—, but also that constantly alters its environment (cognition). Humans do not merely change themselves psychophysically nor are limited to the natural environment as other species, but also configure their surrounding world in a meaningful, spiritual way, culturally and universally.

Some of the incompatibilities detectable between Husserl’s systemic views and those of Capra and Luisi, as well as of Prigogine, among others, are the following:

1. The latter adamantly reject teleology in their conception of nature, for they understand it as a necessary metaphysical—regulative or speculative—principle (in Leibniz’s, Kant’s or Hegel’s senses). Whereas Husserl, instead, discovers in the structure of intentionality and in the inner processes leading from passive to active subjective life an inner open-ended teleology, the outcome of which is not entirely predictable.
2. The authors of the systems view of life do not acknowledge the “essential distinctions” between—on one side—the psychophysical (noetic) and/or symbolic (linguistic) vehicles, and—on the other side—the noematic (perceptual, conceptual, valuative, normative) sense/meaning-contents transmitted by them. Only the latter are bearers of “objectivity” and “validation.” I suspect that this μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γἐνος also affects most of the studies in cognitive sciences.
3. Although Capra and Luisi propose a “look from within” that they acknowledge not only in phenomenology, but also in psychological introspection, and in oriental spiritual traditions such as Buddhism (2014: 261, 263–264 ff.), they still seem to favor a unilateral “objectivistic” (third-person) criterion regarding the “hard problem of consciousness.”

In sum, despite the fact that we still have to deepen and solve some—or several—incongruencies, I do believe that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is not only more compatible but also more consistent with this new “unifying vision” that “at its deepest level, involves a perceptual shift from physics to the life sciences” (Capra & Luisi 2014: 15). This path could go beyond the one Varela expressed as a future task: not only the “phenomenologization” of the “natural sciences,” but of culture in general.

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