The deadlock of Husserl’s life-world: From a critique of psychologism to psychologization

The tragic failure of modern psychology: The enigma of subjectivity

Perhaps Husserl’s most important insight is that the “crisis” of science lies in the loss of its meaning for life (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 5): that is, science “abstracts from everything subjective” (p. 6). Husserl dramatically presents this alienation of modern man when he says that “all the shapes of the spiritual world, all the conditions of life, ideals, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves like fleeting waves … . [R]eason must turn into nonsense, and well-being into misery” (p. 7). Husserl’s version of “all that is solid melts into air” tries to account for how everyday induction grew into induction according to scientific method (p. 50). The model of this, for Husserl, is modern geometry, the decisive step of which was to supersede the actual praxis of more-or-less measuring the concrete world and shifting attention to the mathematical exactness of the ideal geometrical space as a systematic, coherent a priori. This self-enclosed, theoretical realm and its axiomatic findings were believed to permit, deductively, the univocal construction of every shape in actual space and time (p. 22). Galileo generalized this stance to the whole scientific field, advancing the notion that modern science deals with mathematical idealities which are spread as a garb of ideas onto the world (p. 51). Science in this way could envision its mastery of the totality of being “without anything left over” (p. 22).

Does this mean that the exhaustive objectivization of modern science—as it abstracts from everything subjective, reducing everything to merely mathematical propositions—actually leads to de-subjectivation? Or, conversely, did the enigma of subjectivity see light through the objectivizations of science, beyond dignity and freedom? With Galileo the two sides of this become visible. Science not only brings de-subjectivation; the expulsion of the subject is also the primary condition for objectifying mathematical science: “Galileo abstracts from the subjects as persons leading a personal life; he abstracts from all that is in any way spiritual, from all cultural properties which are attached to things in human praxis” (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 51). Both, only seemingly opposed, stances (de-subjectivation as a consequence, de-subjectivation as a condition) point to the fact that modernity inaugurated a structural break regarding subjectivity. Is it not here that we find psychology, and consequently, according to Husserl, its “tragic failure”? Following Husserl, we can see that psychology is not simply another one of the sciences. Rather, psychology emerges precisely because of the de-subjectivation (both as a consequence and as a condition) of modern science. Put differently, the enigma of subjectivity spawned by modern science needed a psychology. For Husserl, however, psychology was wrong to adopt the methodology of the mathematical or natural sciences insofar as psychology tries to solve the problem of subjectivity with the very tools that engendered it. Psychology’s own particular crisis is the “enigma of subjectivity,” leading to the “enigma of psychological matter and method” (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 5).

Husserl (1954/1970) situates this problem within Cartesianism. Galileo’s mathematization of natural science led to Cartesian dualism and, as the world was split into the physical and the psychical realms, this prepared the way for psychology: “[A] psychology in the modern sense, a psychology which, because it had universal nature and a science of nature [as a model], could strive for a corresponding universality, i.e., within a similarly self-enclosed field of its own” (p. 60). Here Husserl does something interesting: he decenters Cartesian dualism by redoubling the antagonism at the site of nature. Leaving behind the classic opposition nature versus psychology (events in nature with their mathematical properties versus their sensible and subjective effects), Husserl opposes pure mathematics to mathematics of spatio-temporal forms. Nature in its true being-in-itself is mathematical and is thus to be contrasted with the more concrete universal lawfulness of nature. Husserl denotes a gap between “mathematically ideal being before all actual experience” and the applied mathematics of inductive natural science dealing with “factual experiential data” (p. 54). He then writes:

How can we understand this “lack” in the pure idealities of mathematics? Is this not the ultimate place of the crack in the universal, the primary gap in the symbolic which as such engenders the dimension of the subjective? Husserl refuses to situate the lack (and thus subjectivity) within the dualism of nature versus psychology, where the problem is invariably located at the place of the sensible and so-called “subjective” experience of mathematical nature. For, as he shows, dualism offers no place for subjectivity whatsoever: “The world splits, so to speak, into two worlds: nature and the psychic world, although the latter, because of the way in which it is related to nature, does not achieve the status of an independent world” (p. 60). Within dualism the psychical dimension is always under threat from a further encroachment of objectivism. In contemporary terms, subjectivity is always the object of newer and more enhanced brain-scanning techniques. Today more than ever, half-hearted attempts to resist this colonization prove powerless as psychology’s only defense is to resort to borrowing its paradigms from elsewhere (managerial or commercial models, cybernetics…). Here Husserl’s operation beyond the classic dualism is worth reinvoking. Modern subjectivity is not to be understood within the opposition of nature versus psyche precisely because the initial antagonism lies within nature as it was mathematized in modernity. Pure mathematics entails a gap, in that it has to be realized as knowing, and this gap is the very space of subjectivity. The garb-of-ideas has to be spread, and because of this very exigency it does not fit the world and this leads to the opening up of interstitial spaces for subjectivity. Does this not boil down to a subjectivization of nature itself? It is a paradox which recalls Marx’s main decentering movement when, in his Critique of Political Economy (1859/1977), he argues not that the economy should be politicized, but, rather, that the economy is always already political. In the same way, Husserl’s situating the primary antagonism within mathematical nature means that we have to understand nature as such as already subjective!

Husserl’s concept of the life-world should be situated precisely here. As we will see, it is via the concept of life-world that Husserl conceives of subjectivity as that which actually brings about world-validity. So let us now follow how he moves from the enigma of subjectivity to the enigma of the world and conceptualizes his transcendental subjectivity.

Transcendental phenomenology: Tackling the enigma of the world

According to Husserl (1954/1970), the mathematization of the world not only rendered the functioning of subjectivity incomprehensible (p. 67)—insofar as it becomes impossible to understand subjectivity on the basis of a physicalistic naturalism—it also brought to light the enigma of the world experience: how it is that we might explain man’s naïve certainty of the obviousness of the world. Here, in the face of the deadlocks of psychologism, Husserl criticizes Descartes for not having carried through the radicalism of his ideas and not having pursued his notion of universal doubt (epoché) to the end. Descartes did not bracket the Galilean certainty of a universal and absolutely pure world of physical bodies. He did not bracket the self “as a whole man as I am valid for myself in my natural possession of the world” (p. 79). Descartes thus stopped short of his ego, the latter being the goal he had envisioned in advance as a kind of purified soul kept free from the epoché. In this way, Descartes was stuck in the natural scientist’s or the psychologist’s way of looking at things, which is to say he took the natural ground of the world as pre-given and for granted (p. 80). Descartes only evaded the problem of the obviousness of the world. Husserl thus calls Descartes’s cogito a little tag-end: Descartes sought to ground objective science within the cogito, which at the same time has itself to be grounded “along with everything else as a legitimate subject matter within the sciences, i.e. in psychology” (p. 81).

This Cartesian ego, being its own blind ground, from then on started to haunt psychology. Husserl (1954/1970) argues that Locke had already obscured the problematic Cartesian stance in order to establish psychology as the keystone and the “epistemological grounding of the objectivity of the objective sciences” (p. 84). Subjectivity as the inevitable/necessary breach of objectivism has to be contained by psychology and, in order to do so, psychology has to deny the enigma of subjectivity as this is bound to lay bare the very enigma of objectivity and the experience of the world as such. Husserl writes that while Locke with his tabula rasa conception of the mind could still uphold the plausibility of a self-enclosed psychology providing the closure of science, gradually, through the idealism of Berkeley and Hume and finally through skepticism, the absurdities could no longer be avoided.

Here the enigma of the world fully burst open. Berkeley’s and Hume’s radicalization of the Cartesian problem shook dogmatic objectivism to the foundations (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 90). Husserl (1954/1970) contends that the key problem became that of how to think together the faculty of pure a priori thinking, or pure reason, and the faculty of sensibility. The fact that we receive sense data from the outside becomes an enigma because it is inconceivable how the “experiential world of the pre-scientific man—the world not yet logicized by mathematics—was the world pre-given by mere sensibility” (p. 93). Or in other words, the problem arose as to how our experience of the world via sensibility makes sense without any recourse to reason. How, for example, does pre-scientific man experience identity in the continuously changing flow of sense-data (p. 93)? The zest of this philosophical discussion is the failure to provide a theoretical justification for so-called “vulgar beliefs.” Hume showed that philosophical inquiry can only lead to skepticism (Tagore, 1994). For Kant, Husserl (1954/1970) writes, Hume thus revealed “a gulf of incomprehensibility” as to how reason could guarantee knowledge of things (p. 93). Husserl then glosses Kant’s solution that sense-data are already brought together through a priori forms without any appeal to reason. While “the things in themselves” are unknowable, “the material of the sense-data arises from a transcendent affection by things in themselves” (p. 95). For Husserl, Kant thus made objective science into an accomplishment remaining within subjectivity while opting for a traditional scope for philosophy, “extending even to the rationally unknowable in itself” (p. 95). Husserl, however, claims that the real Humean problem lies elsewhere, namely:

Husserl thus again transcends dualism (here of reason versus sensibility) and, arguing against Kant, centralizes the problem of world-belief. For, according to Husserl, the essence of Hume’s problem is the enigma of a world “whose being is being through subjective accomplishment, and this with the self-evidence that another world cannot be at all conceivable” (pp. 96–97). Where Hume invokes imagination to account for the experience of the world (Hume, 1739–1740/2006, p. 129), Husserl proposes his transcendental subjectivity and his two-stage transcendental epoché. The first reduction is the epoché of objective science, the bracketing of all theoretical interests and scientific knowledge. Scientific facts are considered as merely facts in the unified context of the pre-given life-world. The second universal epoché transcends the life-world itself; it brackets the attitude of natural world-life (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 148). Only with this universal epoché are all natural interests put out of play and is the gaze of the philosopher freed from the pre-givenness of the world: the world becomes a phenomenon. This is the discovery of the universal, absolutely self-enclosed and absolutely self-sufficient correlation between the world itself and world-consciousness, the discovery of how subjectivity and conscious life effect the validity of the world. In other words, through the second epoché the world can be seen as the correlate of subjectivity, the latter giving the world its ontic meaning. For Husserl, objective science thus goes astray as it takes the life-world for granted and consequently ignores the fact that it asks questions on the ground of the world’s existing in advance through pre-scientific life. The essence of the crisis of the sciences is that no objective science (not even psychology, which sought to become the universal science of the subjective) made the life-world thematic (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 110).

A first critique: Against the psychology of children and peasants

A basic assumption of Husserl’s transcendental epoché is that science is a human accomplishment among other types of practical accomplishments related to the pre-given world (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 118). Husserl logically conceives the scientific terrain as not fully equal to the life-world, otherwise there would be no second universal epoché. He is thus led to presuppose an extra-scientific terrain where extra-scientific human activity takes place. But is not the problem here that when science is situated as but one of the human praxes, it becomes difficult to understand how the advent of the modern science had such a decisive impact? To further our understanding, let us go back to the Humean problem of understanding sensibility without recourse to reason. Hume (1739–1740/2006) writes in A Treatise of Human Nature:

Here we have one of the most puzzling philosophical conceptualizations of the Enlightenment: the idea of a common sense belonging to children, peasants, and the greater part of mankind. Modern mainstream philosophy and psychology seem to be based on the invention of the extra-scientific naïve, common man with his folk psychology. However, from a present-day perspective it is hard to maintain the idea of man’s pre-scientific naïve presence in the world. For example, is one not, in the simple act of putting the kettle on, always aware that the water is heated to 100 degrees Celsius? Of course, this is easily refuted by postulating a sub- or unconscious level of doing things and being in world. The question, then, is whether we should call this natural, unmediated, or pre-scientific. A simple glance at the habitat and praxes of children and peasants invalidates the idea of a pre-scientific, naïve being immersed in reality. Do most parents not, for example, prepare a space for their newborn infant, a space which is furnished to be safe, stimulating, and structured according to the insights of pediatrics and psychology? A more important argument, however, is that it is a misconception that science itself deals with the common and the naïve. For, on a closer look, the actual object of investigation of the first psychological theories was precisely the scientific subject itself. As Husserl (1954/1970) writes:

Early psychology was thus already far removed from the naïve layman, child, or peasant. Psychophysics, for example, actually researched how man relates to the laws of Newtonian physics, conducting experiments where people were subjected to stimuli concerning quantities and variables whose laws were revealed by the natural sciences (speed, temperature, sound). Once again, psychology cannot be put on the same plane as the other sciences. As Husserl (1954/1970) puts it, psychology’s domain includes “the rational knowing activity and the knowledge of the philosophers, mathematicians, scientists of nature” (p. 67). This means that the call for psychology to abandon its imitation of the natural sciences and to turn to its proper concerns perhaps misses the real issue at stake. The very supposition of a real psychology of the child and the peasant is the foundational myth of psychology, obscuring its blind ground. Drawing upon Husserl himself, we could say that the idea of a pre-scientific subjectivity is nonsensical, simply because subjectivity is the enigmatic product of the objectivations of science.

Does this not make Husserl’s second epoché highly problematic in that it itself postulates a pre-predicative, pre-scientific life-world? Husserl’s life-world leads to several paradoxes, as can be seen in the following argument concerning the transcendental epoché:

Is this strange passage telling us that the bracketing and suspension of the world are not an absolute withdrawal from the world; they are not absolute madness—there is a way back? Phenomenologists will not, of course, see the epoché as a withdrawal from the world. As Jennings (1986) puts it, the reduction transforms the essential acts of consciousness themselves into the subject of rigorous analysis (p. 1237). But do we not have to think through the kind of position this detached gaze boils down to? It is in this respect that Žižek (2007) speaks of Husserl’s dark dream in the Cartesian Meditations, of the transcendental ego surviving a plague which would have wiped out all of humanity. In this way it is interesting to note how in popular culture the transcendental journey almost invariably turns out to be a one-way street. Frodo, for example, at the closing passage of The Lord of the Rings, cannot go back to the Shire to return to the simple and plain life-world. He cannot heal his wounds and must be taken by the Elves overseas to the land of immortality. The same dynamics are discernible with today’s phenomena of psychologization. The modern subject is confronted with psychology and psychologists in all of his or her “other times.” Work and play always can be (and are) scrutinized along psychologizing lines. Just consider the sociopsycho-educational tendency in today’s schooling. From a very young age, children are subjected to theories on bullying, assertiveness, respect for diversity, and so on. This theoretical induction prompts children to adopt a theoretical scrutinizing gaze on their own life and world, after which they are sent back into the world. However, once in the psychology class, there is no way back; the domain of life as it was before the induction in psychology, is, as such, foreclosed.

But, to put it clearly, my main argument is not that the modern subject has lost his or her naïve direct experience of the life-world. Rather, the modern subject is characterized by the endeavor to re-find the naïve experience. This is how we can understand that the phenomenological promise of a straightforward intuition of the world—feeling one’s own body or being in a perspective—had a seminal influence on the 20th century. Jaques-Alain Miller (1996) writes that the popular worship of what is lived and felt, related to the idea of the importance of one’s own body, stems from Husserl. Indeed, the epoché is often interpreted as therapeutic: Kingwell (2002), for example, writes that “the epoché does not take the phenomenologist out of the world but, in a sense, more deeply into it” (p. 202). And to be clear, there are certainly passages in Husserl’s Crisis which feed these kinds of therapeutic-holistic interpretations of the life-world: “This actually intuited, actually experienced and experienceable world, in which practically our whole life takes place, remains unchanged as what it is, in its own essential structure and its own causal style” (Husserl, 1954/1970, pp. 50–51).

This embracing of things as they are and always will be sounds very nostalgic, if not cynical, if we shift our perspective on how today’s globalization—think of the latest financial crisis—affects the concrete life-world of so many people in such a disruptive way. But the worship of the lived and felt can also be connected to the dimension of horror in another way. For is not the joyful “I am here in the world with my body!” returning in the “I am here!” of the monster/ghost/lunatic haunting us? The ghastly image of a figure fully equalling himself, claiming an unmediated presence, is perhaps an echo of the strange double whom Freud depicted in “The Uncanny” (1919/1955). Mladen Dolar contends that the Freudian uncanny has to be understood in terms of the advent of modernity. The objectification of man by modern science has reduced him to a horrifying zero-level of subjectivity (Dolar, 1991). The uncanny double is therefore to be understood as modern man faced with his own being reduced to a puppet-like automaton. If we are thus led to populate the life-world not with the pastoral images of the child and the peasant, but with the horror and the uncanny, we must ask if the always immanent positivation of Husserl’s life-world is not foremost the result of his not thinking through his initial insights regarding the advent of the modern sciences. For, is it not the case that, in focusing on the life-world, Husserl’s original assessment of mathematization as a restless encroaching of the life-world fades away as Crisis progresses? Husserl accomplished a brilliant reversal, as David Carr puts it, by deconstructing the common idea that science overcomes the relativity of the “merely subjective” pictures of the world. Husserl shows that, with a shift in perspective, the scientist himself is the one who starts from a particular sort of picture of the world. For Husserl, both the scientist and his picture are to be situated within the “real” world (Carr, 1977). But, it is here, where Husserl is unwittingly pushed to positivize this life-world, that the paradoxes come in.

The paradoxes of the life-world

For Carr, the first Husserlian paradox is that, while the world depends on consciousness for its “constitution,” it is this very life-world itself that provides the materials with which consciousness deals. Thus, through the transcendental constitution, the life-world loses one of its originally, firmly stated features: its pre-giveness (Carr, 1970). Husserl is of course aware of this paradox, as he asks how a component part of the world, human subjectivity, can constitute the whole world as its intentional formation (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 179). But for Husserl, the paradox vanishes once the epoché is fully carried out:

But is the problem really solved with this? As Johanna Oksala (2005) notes, there still remains the problem of how mundane subjectivity and transcendental subjectivity are related to each other, if they cannot be conflated (p. 59). It is on this point that Foucault (1966/2002) also criticizes Husserlian phenomenology for not being able “to exorcize its insidious kinship, its simultaneously promising and threatening proximity, to empirical analyses of man” (p. 355). For Foucault, the phenomenological project continually resolves itself into a description—empirical despite itself—of actual experience, and into an ontology of the unthought that automatically short-circuits the primacy of the “I think.” Adorno already argued that the strictest concept of the transcendental cannot release itself from its interdependence with the factum. Adorno, however, does not promote a naturalistic interpretation of consciousness. Rather, he contends that “the mind’s moment of non-being is so intertwined with existence, that to pick it out neatly would be the same as to objectify and falsify it” (as cited in Dews, 1995, p. 59). Both Foucault and Adorno point to a fundamental negativity: for Foucault, an ontology of the unthought; for Adorno, a moment of non-being.

That Husserl does not deal with this negativity points to the fact that his concept of the life-world always risks becoming something empirical and positivized. Just consider how Husserl starts off in Crisis with the antagonism between life-world and science, the first being unmediated, the latter mediated. Gradually, however, he incorporates culture and even science into the life-world and, as Carr (1977) argues, in his culturalizing of the life-world Husserl eventually faces its “cultural relativity” (p. 208). Husserl tries to contain this by postulating that the life-world with all its relative features has a non-relative general structure to which everything that exists is bound. For Husserl (1954/1970), this general structure can be attended to in its generality and can be fixed “once and for all in a way equally accessible to all” (p. 139). Carr (1977) points to the problem that this only would result in establishing the general structures of the cultural world and not necessarily of the world of immediate experience (p. 209). But things get further complicated when Husserl, in addition, places science as a whole within the life-world. Carr (1977) tries to save the conceptual edifice by postulating two different worlds, culture and science, as two mediations which focus on different aspects of the concrete world and have a different historical development. Is the problem here not that Carr, in attempting to differentiate culture from science, like Husserl, passes over the political fact that in modernity science became precisely the master discourse which founds culture? While Husserl’s merit was to historicize the advent of science as a decisive turn, assessing the weight of Galileo’s generalization of geometry’s mathematization of the world, gradually, in the progressing of Crisis, this insight loses its sharpness exactly where, one can argue, Husserl does not engage with the political implications. One can argue that in modernity scientific knowledge came to fulfill the role of the guarantor and support of various cultural practices and discourses (politics, education, art, etc.).Thus, in accordance with the first sections of Crisis, it is exactly where there are breaches in the big Other of Science—in the mazes of the mathematical garb of ideas—that psychology enters in an attempt to provide the closure of Science. This latter point is what Husserl admirably assessed. However, in trying to emancipate phenomenology from this problematic, he chose to go beyond mediation by putting forward an unmediated life-world fully equal to itself. Where Husserl ends up with a general structure, where both culture and science become mere subfields of the life-world, it becomes more and more difficult to grasp how modern science was itself directly connected to the political and ideological project of the Enlightenment. Focusing on the life-world, Husserl loses his grip on how, in modernity, culture itself is ridden by science and how it is perhaps in the very crossing of the two domains that we find the transcendental dimension of the truth in its very political and ideological meaning.

Is not the crucial point that, where Husserl had rightly posited the life-world as the unrecognized, taken-for-grantedness of the natural sciences, he should have understood the life-world as an empty presupposition? This is exactly what Slavoj Žižek (1986) claims:

Here Žižek simply pushes to the limit Husserl’s contention that science is all-inclusive, that it masters the world “without anything [being] left over” (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 22). This is similar to Giorgi Agamben’s argument that in the founding project of modern science there is a fundamental and total expropriation of experience. Science annihilates experience when it identifies the subject of knowledge with the subject of experience. This loss of experience is, for Agamben, not something partial but something radical and irreversible (Agamben, 2007, p. 47). Is it not clear from this perspective that Husserl’s attempt to establish a transcendental subjectivity based on a ground beyond science is doomed to fail insofar as it attempts to bypass the closing down of the unmediated experience of the life-world? Here Agamben’s stance might be more interesting. For Agamben, the expropriation of experience should perhaps not be deplored as such, as it could be the site of the refusal of the imperative to experience (p. 15). In the same vein, Jacques Lacan (1988) considered the symbolic, mediated, mathematized body which modernity brought us as something which allows the modern subject, although reduced to “something decomposed,” to possess greater freedom (p. 31). The subject is the gap, is the relation to what defines him or her.

If modern subjectivity cannot be cut loose from the objectification effectuated by the modern sciences, then the zero-level of subjectivity also boils down to a zero-level of psychology. The question then is whether Husserl should be criticized for failing to follow his own assessment of the crisis—as a crisis of psychology—through to the end, considering that his postulation of the life-world eventually harbors the paradox of a psychological-transcendental doublet. In the closing paragraphs of Crisis, Husserl (1954/1970) postulates a “difference and identity … between the psychological ego (the human ego, that is, made worldly in the spatio-temporal world) and the transcendental ego, its ego-life, and its accomplishment” (p. 205).

There is, it seems, a way back from the transcendental epoché … but it is a way which leads Husserl to psychology. Let us, therefore, in the last section, explore how Husserl’s critique of psychology can even be said to provide the very model of psychologization.

From psychologism to psychologization

In Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Husserl (1913/1998) acknowledges the risk that he might “psychologize the eidetic” (p. 139). In fact, the whole endeavor of phenomenology must be understood within Husserl’s position in the so-called psychologism debate. The gist of Husserl’s critique is that psychologism is the confusing of the resulting consciousness of essences (color, shape) with the essences themselves: that is, “ascribing to the flux of consciousness as its really inherent component part something which necessarily transcends it” (Husserl, 1913/1998, p. 140). In Logical Investigations (1900/2001a), Husserl recounts how he came to criticize the underpinning of science with a psychologically founded logic:

Criticizing the deadlocks of psychologism—skeptical relativism and absurdities—Husserl (1900/2001a) searches for a “pure logic,” arguing that truths “are what they are,” “whether we have insight into them or not” (p. 150). Starting with Ideas, the method of exploring the essences involved in the relationship between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known is the already mentioned phenomenological reduction. For Husserl (1913/1998), the Cartesian epoché of doubting all certainties imposed on us by tradition and power has to be extended: the question to be asked is what remains “if the whole world, including ourselves with all our cogitare, is excluded?” (p. 63). In Crisis, Husserl posits that it is the life-world which remains. On the side of the subjectivity of knowing, the epoché leads to a “phenomenological residuum,” that of a “pure consciousness” (pp. 63–64). Here Husserl claims to be beyond psychology:

Husserl wards off the psychological gaze; pure consciousness is beyond the psychological Ego’s reflecting on itself. In this way, criticizing psychologism and psychology’s ambition to be the keystone of the sciences, Husserl instead puts forward phenomenology as the alternative. Furthermore, he claims that once the eidetic work is done, one can return from the phenomenological vantage point and provide psychology with the foundation it was lacking (Husserl, 1913/1998, p. 173). Husserl makes a similar point in Crisis, where he contends that psychology should be founded on transcendental philosophy as the source of the a priori structural concepts which it must utilize (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 260).

The question we need to ask now is whether Husserl’s phenomenology is really able to transcend psychology. There is no issue here with the claim for the a priori position, the meta-position from which one looks upon the sciences, and in particular on psychology. This claim in itself is not problematic. Such a position is inevitably claimed in critical engagements with, for example, the psy-sciences. In this sense, I have done nothing here but search for such a position. It only becomes problematic if a return is considered possible; in other words, if the illusion is held that the insight obtained from the vantage point is useful for the terrain itself. Once one has claimed a vantage point, one is moving on a totally different terrain; one has entered, so to speak, another world. Here the fundamental critique is that Husserl, rather than falling back into psychologism—such allegations were made after the first edition of the Logical Investigations—actually opens the way to psychologization. For if, in Crisis, Husserl eventually underpins the objectivity of the content known in the life-world, it is exactly this idea of a pre-given, pre-scientific life-world which can be said to fuel psychologization. Just consider how mainstream psychology and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology meet each other in the conception and construction of a life-world as a free haven against the encroachment of the sciences. Where the total imposition of science on the life-world gave the world as such worldliness, psychological discourse is the attempt to construct a meaningful habitat for the modern subject. Consider, for example, some recent headlines from the magazine Psychology Today: “Weathering the Storm: A Guide to Surviving Tough Times” (Grierson, 2009); “The Art of Now: Six Steps to Living in the Moment” (Dixit, 2008), “Dare To Be Yourself” (Wright, 2008). Mainstream psychology is the attempt to reconstruct a life-world. But here we find a second, more structural parallel. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology relies on man being embedded in his life-world. At the same time, however, the latter is only to be understood as coming to be via the transcendental stance and the transcendental vantage point. Do we not encounter the same issue with psychology and its seemingly inseparable shadow of psychologization? Psychology, that is, is essentially about the constituting of the psychological subject, a subject necessarily looked down upon from a certain vantage point. If psychology is about reconnecting the subject to the world, then this is done in a very peculiar way. Psychology connects the modern subject to his or her double, the naïve psychological subject, and this latter is only a presupposition and construction of psychology itself. Psychology thus hails its subject to join the ranks of those who survey the life-world. The look, that’s what you are imposes the meta-position, resulting in an oh really, is that the way I am? Psychology invites man to look upon himself as a psychologist. Psychology is, as such, the praxis of psychologization, constructing the transcendental residual vantage point from which the subject is seen as connected (in a Husserlian straightforward way) to the life-world.

In this way it is not so surprising that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in the end turns back to psychology. The transcendental subject eventually shares its structure with the psychologized Ego. For Husserl (1931/1999), the splitting of the Ego requires, as an assumed starting point, the Ego as “naturally immersed in the world,” which then establishes itself as “disinterested onlooker” (p. 35). However, if we start from the notion of the closing down of the life-world by science, this “naïve interested subject” cannot but be considered as nonexistent. Husserl’s psychological ego is a presupposition, a construction, a fiction. It is the look at me now, how my behavior is determined by psychology.The radical critique is thus that Husserl, rightly assessing how empirical and positivistic psychology were caught up in the deadlock of psychologism, provided psychology with a way out. His phenomenological vantage point with its perspective on the pre-given life-world offered psychology a new paradigm, namely psychologization. Husserl’s epoché initiated the point beyond psychology from which the modern subject can view him- or herself as a psychological ego:

Husserl’s eidetic science thus provides the model for a psychology based on psychologization. Phenomenology, rather than catering for the eidetic essences with which psychology could empirically engage, establishes the vantage point from which the modern subject can scrutinize him- or herself, becoming his or her own phenomenologist-psychologist. It is thus no wonder that Husserl’s phenomenology eventually glides into psychological, not to say, semi-therapeutic territories: “Thus every new transcendental discovery, by going back into the natural attitude, enriches my psychic life and (apperceptively as a matter of course) that of every other”(Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 210).

Conclusions

If for Marx the starting point of every critique is the critique of religion, Husserl perhaps has shown that in the perspective of late modernity every critique must be a critique of psychology. However, throughout Crisis Husserl (1954/1970) clearly oscillates between a fundamental critique of psychology and acknowledging psychology as providing a legitimate access to subjectivity:

It is, however, problematic to speak of a pre-scientific common language. In modernity, common language cannot be cut loose from the discourse of science. Husserl’s attempt to ground subjectivity in the life-world seems to prevent him from assessing how psychological discourse, in particular, came to decisively permeate the common language and the life-world.

To which we can counter that there is no natural way of being a father, citizen, or good European. The phenomena of contemporary psychologization show that, as a father or citizen, I am bombarded with psychology; even my European sentiments are the object of psychological research, informing media campaigns to influence them (see for a critique Velikonja, 2005). In each account of fatherhood or citizenship, which are historically modern constructs, the discursive traces of psychology (and psychoanalysis) will be abundant.

In the end, the fundamental, albeit implicit, shift in Crisis is the passage from phenomenology as a philosophical method to phenomenology as a description of human subjectivity. Setting out with his aim to formulate a rigorous method for a universal science, Husserl conceives the transcendental epoché more and more as how man relates to the world. It is here that the immanent psychologizing of the life-world emerges, precisely where Husserl turns from universality to particularity, where he attempts to ground transcendentality in a positive life-world, thus returning to the factum and the empirical.

Moreover, when Husserl (1931/1999) argues that the transcendental Ego’s sole remaining interest is “to describe adequately what he sees, purely as seen, as what is seen and seen in such and such a manner” (p. 35), then his transcendental subject is maybe nothing more than a scientific subject, driven by the desire to know. Husserl’s transcendentalism thus leads not to the subject of the life-world, but to the subject of the sciences and, where he does not himself fully address this insight, he glides into psychology. This danger of tilting over into psychology seems, a fortiori, the case with a specific range of disciplines or discourses, such as politics (e.g., politics focusing on well-being and leaving politico-economic decisions to the market), art (psychologizing the artist and the experience of art), psychoanalysis (considering it[self] as a special kind of psychology). Put slightly differently, modern science manifests its breaches at the very points of its success; the total grip on the life-world opens up the paradoxical empty space of and for subjectivity. It is here that we have different praxes: the praxis of politics, the praxis of love, the praxis of art… All these praxes touch the real of subjectivity, in contrast to science, which has no access to it. Psychology, however, seems to be, above all, the discourse which aims to contain this overflow as it functions as the defense mechanism against subjectivity, always threatening to suffocate politics, art, and love.

Although Husserl starts off Crisis with the understanding that the stakes are political, phenomenology eventually loses every political dimension. Claiming a phenomenological access to the objectivity of the content known, Husserl does not deal with how in modernity the relation subject—Other was decisively reworked by the sciences. Although he rightfully assesses the deadlock of psychologism and a psychological underpinning of modernity and modern subjectivity, his phenomenology, in the end, only signals the transition to psychologization. The pure phenomenological Ego becomes the vantage point to oversee the psychologized life-world. The crisis is defused. The life-world in the end is the de-politicized phantasm of Academia, the latter being the place of sovereignty in these post-statist times.