WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.419 Welcome to The Debate. We are looking at a man 00:00:02.419 --> 00:00:05.860 today who, well, who in my view attempted probably 00:00:05.860 --> 00:00:09.980 the most audacious intellectual reboot in history. 00:00:10.279 --> 00:00:13.460 We're talking about Edmund Husserl. Now, I know 00:00:13.460 --> 00:00:15.820 people often dismiss philosophy as abstract, 00:00:16.039 --> 00:00:19.320 but Husserl was a mathematician. He wanted certainty. 00:00:19.480 --> 00:00:21.480 He wanted a foundation for science that was, 00:00:21.559 --> 00:00:24.420 you know, absolutely unshakable. And to get there, 00:00:24.500 --> 00:00:26.760 he decided we had to stop looking at the world 00:00:26.760 --> 00:00:29.649 and start looking at the lens. We're seeing it 00:00:29.649 --> 00:00:33.829 through. And that is exactly, I mean, exactly 00:00:33.829 --> 00:00:37.829 where he went off the rails. Look, I have immense 00:00:37.829 --> 00:00:39.990 respect for Husserl's intellect. The man was 00:00:39.990 --> 00:00:42.909 a giant, no question. But we are here to discuss 00:00:42.909 --> 00:00:45.750 a very specific turn in his thinking. The shift 00:00:45.750 --> 00:00:48.409 where he decided that the only way to save reality 00:00:48.409 --> 00:00:52.969 was to retreat entirely into the mind. He called 00:00:52.969 --> 00:00:56.829 it transcendental phenomenology, which is a mouthful. 00:00:56.850 --> 00:00:59.600 But let's be honest. It's an intellectual trap. 00:00:59.799 --> 00:01:02.479 It's the philosophy of a man locked in a room, 00:01:02.579 --> 00:01:05.180 convincing himself that the room only exists 00:01:05.180 --> 00:01:08.659 because he's looking at it. Okay, that is a massive 00:01:08.659 --> 00:01:11.700 oversimplification, and you know it. We are debating 00:01:11.700 --> 00:01:15.560 the shift Hussle made, what, around 1913? The 00:01:15.560 --> 00:01:18.400 question is this. Can we reach absolute truth 00:01:18.400 --> 00:01:21.420 by bracketing the external world, by putting 00:01:21.420 --> 00:01:24.120 our assumptions on hold, and focusing solely 00:01:24.120 --> 00:01:27.560 on consciousness? Or, as you seem to think, Does 00:01:27.560 --> 00:01:30.519 that just turn us into solipsists, totally cut 00:01:30.519 --> 00:01:33.000 off from reality? It's not just what I think. 00:01:33.140 --> 00:01:35.500 It's what his best students thought. You look 00:01:35.500 --> 00:01:37.819 at the early Husserl, and he's a realist. He's 00:01:37.819 --> 00:01:40.840 fighting for logic. Then suddenly, he pivots. 00:01:41.000 --> 00:01:43.859 He starts telling us that the world is constituted 00:01:43.859 --> 00:01:47.280 by the ego. So that's the debate. Did he unlock 00:01:47.280 --> 00:01:49.359 the secrets of consciousness? Or did he just, 00:01:49.459 --> 00:01:51.659 you know, lose touch with the real world? He 00:01:51.659 --> 00:01:53.980 didn't lose the world. He found the source of 00:01:53.980 --> 00:01:56.140 it. But okay, we're getting ahead of ourselves. 00:01:56.760 --> 00:01:59.340 To really understand why this matters, we have 00:01:59.340 --> 00:02:02.480 to start with where we all live right now. It's 00:02:02.480 --> 00:02:05.680 what Husserl called the natural attitude. Which 00:02:05.680 --> 00:02:08.180 is just a fancy way of saying common sense. It's 00:02:08.180 --> 00:02:11.539 more than common sense. It's a trance. In the 00:02:11.539 --> 00:02:14.520 natural attitude, we assume that objects are 00:02:14.520 --> 00:02:17.479 just out there, like furniture in a room, and 00:02:17.479 --> 00:02:20.360 we are just cameras recording them. We assume 00:02:20.360 --> 00:02:22.979 the world is a hard physical fact that exists 00:02:22.979 --> 00:02:26.580 entirely independent of us. Husserl's genius 00:02:26.580 --> 00:02:30.379 was to say, stop, look at that assumption. You 00:02:30.379 --> 00:02:34.139 are not a camera. You are an active participant. 00:02:34.639 --> 00:02:37.960 To truly understand reality, you have to perform 00:02:37.960 --> 00:02:40.520 the Apoche. You have to suspend that belief. 00:02:41.080 --> 00:02:43.659 Okay, let's ground this for a second, because 00:02:43.659 --> 00:02:47.120 epoche sounds incredibly mystical, and it's not. 00:02:47.219 --> 00:02:50.159 It's a Greek term for suspension of judgment. 00:02:50.400 --> 00:02:53.300 But here is my problem with how Husserl uses 00:02:53.300 --> 00:02:56.939 it. You say the natural attitude is a trance. 00:02:56.979 --> 00:03:00.479 I say it's survival. If I see a bus coming toward 00:03:00.479 --> 00:03:03.479 me, I don't perform a phenomenological reduction 00:03:03.479 --> 00:03:06.360 and analyze how the redness of the bus is given 00:03:06.360 --> 00:03:10.090 to my consciousness. I jump out of the way. Because 00:03:10.090 --> 00:03:13.590 the bus is real. It has mass and velocity, regardless 00:03:13.590 --> 00:03:16.430 of my intentionality. Bus is a hallucination. 00:03:16.750 --> 00:03:19.810 He's asking, how do you know it's a bus? How 00:03:19.810 --> 00:03:22.689 does that meaning danger, vehicle, redness, how 00:03:22.689 --> 00:03:25.330 does that all assemble itself in your mind? Think 00:03:25.330 --> 00:03:27.870 of it like a virtual reality headset. The natural 00:03:27.870 --> 00:03:30.409 attitude is playing the game and completely forgetting 00:03:30.409 --> 00:03:32.349 you're wearing the headset. You think you're 00:03:32.349 --> 00:03:35.409 in a jungle fighting tigers. Hustrell says, take 00:03:35.409 --> 00:03:38.490 the headset off. Or, better yet, Keep it on, 00:03:38.530 --> 00:03:40.990 but look at the screen. Look at the pixels. Look 00:03:40.990 --> 00:03:43.550 at how the software is rendering the tiger. That 00:03:43.550 --> 00:03:45.810 isn't denying the tiger. It's understanding the 00:03:45.810 --> 00:03:48.090 mechanism of the tiger's appearance. That's a 00:03:48.090 --> 00:03:51.110 slick analogy, but it hides the danger. If you 00:03:51.110 --> 00:03:54.210 treat the world like a VR rendering, you stop 00:03:54.210 --> 00:03:56.530 caring about the hardware that's running it. 00:03:56.770 --> 00:03:59.789 And look, I grant you, Husserl started strong. 00:04:00.150 --> 00:04:03.389 His logical investigations in 1900 were just 00:04:03.389 --> 00:04:07.189 brilliant. He absolutely destroyed psychologism. 00:04:07.449 --> 00:04:09.969 Right. The idea that logic is just how our brains 00:04:09.969 --> 00:04:13.509 happen to be wired. Exactly. He proved that 2 00:04:13.509 --> 00:04:16.490 plus 2 equals 4 is true whether humans exist 00:04:16.490 --> 00:04:19.230 or not. It's an objective truth. I'm with him 00:04:19.230 --> 00:04:23.180 100 % there. But then fast forward to 1913 when 00:04:23.180 --> 00:04:26.180 he publishes Idea's Eye. Suddenly he's not just 00:04:26.180 --> 00:04:28.420 talking about logic. He's talking about trees 00:04:28.420 --> 00:04:31.899 and tables and coffee cups. And he says they 00:04:31.899 --> 00:04:35.279 are constituted by consciousness. He makes the 00:04:35.279 --> 00:04:38.420 object dependent on the subject. And that is 00:04:38.420 --> 00:04:41.170 where he lost the realists. You just can't have 00:04:41.170 --> 00:04:44.110 it both ways. You can't say logic is objective 00:04:44.110 --> 00:04:46.790 and independent, but the physical world is just 00:04:46.790 --> 00:04:49.649 the dependency of my mind. That's not what he 00:04:49.649 --> 00:04:52.730 means at all. Husserl is using the concept of 00:04:52.730 --> 00:04:55.350 intentionality, which he picked up from Brentano. 00:04:55.569 --> 00:04:59.110 The core maxim is, consciousness is always consciousness 00:04:59.110 --> 00:05:02.870 of something. You cannot just think, you must 00:05:02.870 --> 00:05:06.170 think about something. You can't just love, you 00:05:06.170 --> 00:05:09.209 must love someone or something. The mind and 00:05:09.209 --> 00:05:12.350 the world are correlated. They're a pair. You 00:05:12.350 --> 00:05:15.029 can't peel them apart. But he does peel them 00:05:15.029 --> 00:05:17.550 apart. He peels away the world to look at the 00:05:17.550 --> 00:05:22.250 mind. No, no. He peels away our prejudices about 00:05:22.250 --> 00:05:25.610 the world. He wants to see the things themselves 00:05:25.610 --> 00:05:28.970 as they actually appear, not as physics tells 00:05:28.970 --> 00:05:31.569 us they are. If you strip away the observer, 00:05:31.870 --> 00:05:34.350 you aren't left with reality. You're left with 00:05:34.350 --> 00:05:37.480 a mathematical abstraction. Husserl is saying 00:05:37.480 --> 00:05:40.139 that the only reality we have access to is the 00:05:40.139 --> 00:05:43.079 one that appears to us. Constituting the object 00:05:43.079 --> 00:05:45.240 just means putting together the different profiles, 00:05:45.560 --> 00:05:48.339 the front view, the back view, the memory of 00:05:48.339 --> 00:05:51.759 it, into a coherent whole. The mind is active. 00:05:51.839 --> 00:05:54.579 It's building the image. Okay, but listen to 00:05:54.579 --> 00:05:56.720 what you're admitting there. You're saying the 00:05:56.720 --> 00:06:00.100 mind builds the image. If I'm building it, how 00:06:00.100 --> 00:06:02.300 do I know I'm not building it wrong? How do I 00:06:02.300 --> 00:06:04.939 know there's anything behind the facade? This 00:06:04.939 --> 00:06:07.279 is the issue his student Roman Engarden had. 00:06:07.740 --> 00:06:10.639 Engarden was a diehard realist. He basically 00:06:10.639 --> 00:06:13.180 told Husserl, Master, if you keep going down 00:06:13.180 --> 00:06:15.300 this road, you're going to end up in solipsism. 00:06:15.439 --> 00:06:18.199 If the world is just a correlate of my consciousness, 00:06:18.519 --> 00:06:21.279 then I am effectively alone in a theater of my 00:06:21.279 --> 00:06:25.600 own making. Solipsism is, well, it's the lazy 00:06:25.600 --> 00:06:27.839 critique, isn't it? It's what everyone throws 00:06:27.839 --> 00:06:31.439 at idealism because it's a scary thought. But 00:06:31.439 --> 00:06:34.269 Husserl was way ahead of that. This brings us 00:06:34.269 --> 00:06:36.790 to the mechanism of the reduction itself. We 00:06:36.790 --> 00:06:39.149 need to distinguish between the noeseus, the 00:06:39.149 --> 00:06:42.269 act of thinking, and the noema, which is the 00:06:42.269 --> 00:06:46.110 thing, as it is thought. Ah, the noema. This 00:06:46.110 --> 00:06:48.689 is probably the most controversial concept in 00:06:48.689 --> 00:06:51.209 the whole framework. It's controversial because 00:06:51.209 --> 00:06:53.829 people want it to be simple. Think about the 00:06:53.829 --> 00:06:56.129 house example. You're standing in front of a 00:06:56.129 --> 00:06:59.129 house. You see the front door, the windows. That 00:06:59.129 --> 00:07:02.290 is a proper presentation. It's bodily present. 00:07:02.889 --> 00:07:05.550 Now walk away, go to a coffee shop, and think 00:07:05.550 --> 00:07:08.129 about the house. The house is not there physically, 00:07:08.370 --> 00:07:11.649 but you are still intending the same house. The 00:07:11.649 --> 00:07:14.449 nomia, the meaning of that house, is consistent, 00:07:14.670 --> 00:07:18.290 even though the mode of access has changed. Husserl 00:07:18.290 --> 00:07:20.149 lets us study that meaning structure directly. 00:07:20.310 --> 00:07:23.350 We can analyze the essence of houseness without 00:07:23.350 --> 00:07:25.970 needing to go bang on the drywall to see if it's 00:07:25.970 --> 00:07:28.870 real. But that's just psychology. If I'm analyzing 00:07:28.870 --> 00:07:31.610 my memory of the house, or my concept of the 00:07:31.610 --> 00:07:34.819 house, I am looking at my internal mental furniture. 00:07:35.240 --> 00:07:38.540 I am not looking at the house. This was the fight 00:07:38.540 --> 00:07:41.560 he had with Frege. Frege said there is the sense, 00:07:41.800 --> 00:07:44.839 the meaning, and the reference, the actual object. 00:07:45.579 --> 00:07:48.939 Husserl blurs them. He fuses the object into 00:07:48.939 --> 00:07:51.639 the act of perception. So if you bracket the 00:07:51.639 --> 00:07:54.160 existence of the external world, you are effectively 00:07:54.160 --> 00:07:56.379 cutting the cord to the reference. You're just 00:07:56.379 --> 00:07:58.439 studying the sense. You're studying the internal 00:07:58.439 --> 00:08:01.339 movie. You keep calling it an internal movie 00:08:01.339 --> 00:08:04.620 like it's a hallucination. It's not. It's the 00:08:04.620 --> 00:08:07.519 essence. Hustle developed a tool for this called 00:08:07.519 --> 00:08:11.680 eidetic furiation. It's brilliant, really. Let's 00:08:11.680 --> 00:08:14.360 say I want to understand what a cup is. I don't 00:08:14.360 --> 00:08:17.160 need to go out and measure 5 ,000 cups. I can 00:08:17.160 --> 00:08:19.899 do it right here in my mind. I imagine a cup. 00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:22.639 Can I change the color? Yes, it's still a cup. 00:08:22.800 --> 00:08:25.939 Can I make it giant? Yep, still a cup. Can I 00:08:25.939 --> 00:08:28.300 seal the top so liquid can't get in? Then it's 00:08:28.300 --> 00:08:31.420 a block, not a cup. Exactly. The moment I seal 00:08:31.420 --> 00:08:35.279 the top, the cupness explodes. It vanishes. By 00:08:35.279 --> 00:08:38.500 doing this little mental variation, I have discovered 00:08:38.500 --> 00:08:41.259 an absolute invariant truth about the essence 00:08:41.259 --> 00:08:44.519 of a cup. It must be a vessel capable of containment. 00:08:44.720 --> 00:08:46.960 I discovered that without leaving my armchair. 00:08:47.120 --> 00:08:49.779 That is rigorous science. That is getting to 00:08:49.779 --> 00:08:52.480 the things themselves, the essences that govern 00:08:52.480 --> 00:08:55.580 reality. Okay, that works for cups. It works 00:08:55.580 --> 00:08:59.000 for triangles. Husserl was a mathematician, and 00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:02.320 he treats the world like geometry. But try doing 00:09:02.320 --> 00:09:06.100 identical variation on your wife. Try doing it 00:09:06.100 --> 00:09:08.919 on the Nazis marching in Berlin outside his window. 00:09:09.200 --> 00:09:13.240 You can't just vary history in your mind and 00:09:13.240 --> 00:09:17.159 call it truth. The world has a brute force resistance 00:09:17.159 --> 00:09:20.539 that this method just ignores. And this leads 00:09:20.539 --> 00:09:23.320 us to the absolute hardest problem for Husserl. 00:09:23.600 --> 00:09:27.440 The one he spent years agonizing over. Other 00:09:27.440 --> 00:09:32.700 people. Right. If I am this transcendental ego, 00:09:32.940 --> 00:09:36.740 this godlike creator of meaning, and I constitute 00:09:36.740 --> 00:09:41.840 the world, then I must also constitute you. You 00:09:41.840 --> 00:09:45.000 are just a phenomenon in my visual field. You're 00:09:45.000 --> 00:09:47.940 a coat and a hat and a sound stream coming at 00:09:47.940 --> 00:09:51.649 me. How do I know you have a mind? How do I know 00:09:51.649 --> 00:09:54.570 you aren't just a philosophical zombie? Under 00:09:54.570 --> 00:09:57.710 Husserl's strict rules, I can't know that. I 00:09:57.710 --> 00:10:00.370 am trapped. He addresses this head -on in the 00:10:00.370 --> 00:10:03.289 Cartesian meditations. He doesn't dodge it. He 00:10:03.289 --> 00:10:07.250 describes the sphere of oneness, what is undeniably 00:10:07.250 --> 00:10:11.490 mine, my body, my sensations. But then I encounter 00:10:11.490 --> 00:10:14.149 something unique in my field of vision. I see 00:10:14.149 --> 00:10:17.009 a body that looks like mine. It moves like mine. 00:10:17.210 --> 00:10:20.929 It looks like mine? That's the argument? That's 00:10:20.929 --> 00:10:23.830 it? It's deeper than that. It's pairing. It's 00:10:23.830 --> 00:10:26.850 an associative transfer of meaning. I see your 00:10:26.850 --> 00:10:29.149 physical behavior. You flinch when you touch 00:10:29.149 --> 00:10:32.750 fire, just like I do. Instantly, involuntarily, 00:10:32.850 --> 00:10:36.409 my ego transfers the sense of subject onto you. 00:10:36.529 --> 00:10:40.190 I grasp you by analogy. I don't telepathically 00:10:40.190 --> 00:10:43.450 enter your mind, but I experience you as an alter 00:10:43.450 --> 00:10:47.190 ego, another I. This isn't a flaw. It's the only 00:10:47.190 --> 00:10:49.669 way we can know others. We always bridge the 00:10:49.669 --> 00:10:52.730 gap through empathy and analogy. But analogy 00:10:52.730 --> 00:10:56.250 is a guess. That's my point. If I see a character 00:10:56.250 --> 00:10:58.950 in a video game, they move like me, they flinch 00:10:58.950 --> 00:11:01.830 when I shoot them, they run away. By Husserl's 00:11:01.830 --> 00:11:03.570 logic, I should assume they have a conscious 00:11:03.570 --> 00:11:07.389 soul. But they don't. They are code. Husserl's 00:11:07.389 --> 00:11:10.470 pairing is just projection. It's the lonely ego 00:11:10.470 --> 00:11:12.690 painting faces on the rocks to feel less alone. 00:11:13.149 --> 00:11:16.029 He never truly breaks out of the sphere. He just 00:11:16.029 --> 00:11:18.269 decorates the walls with pictures of other people. 00:11:19.289 --> 00:11:21.409 Transcendental intersubjectivity is a community 00:11:21.409 --> 00:11:24.649 of one. I think you're being incredibly uncharitable 00:11:24.649 --> 00:11:27.490 to the nuance of the argument. It's not just 00:11:27.490 --> 00:11:29.889 visual matching. It's a reciprocal relationship. 00:11:30.470 --> 00:11:33.350 But look, even if you think he failed to fully 00:11:33.350 --> 00:11:36.070 solve the other mind's problem, which, by the 00:11:36.070 --> 00:11:39.340 way, no philosopher has solved perfectly. You 00:11:39.340 --> 00:11:42.039 have to admire how he tried to ground logic and 00:11:42.039 --> 00:11:44.940 math in this same framework. Because that's where 00:11:44.940 --> 00:11:46.960 things get really interesting in his late career. 00:11:47.259 --> 00:11:49.500 You mean where things get messy? I mean where 00:11:49.500 --> 00:11:51.980 they get vital. Husserl spent his life fighting 00:11:51.980 --> 00:11:56.080 for logic as a pure, super temporal science. 00:11:56.419 --> 00:11:59.879 He built this whole hierarchy from grammar to 00:11:59.879 --> 00:12:03.620 logic to a theory of manifolds. Pure, beautiful, 00:12:03.779 --> 00:12:08.220 objective truth. And then in 1936. Knowing he 00:12:08.220 --> 00:12:10.799 was dying, knowing Europe was collapsing into 00:12:10.799 --> 00:12:14.299 fascism, he writes The Crisis of European Sciences. 00:12:14.740 --> 00:12:17.200 And suddenly the pure logician starts talking 00:12:17.200 --> 00:12:20.259 about the Lebenswelt, the life world. Because 00:12:20.259 --> 00:12:23.000 he realized that science had lost its way. Or 00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:25.799 because he realized his philosophy had no ground. 00:12:26.159 --> 00:12:29.240 The life world is the world of everyday experience. 00:12:29.919 --> 00:12:32.720 Culture, history, going to the market, talking 00:12:32.720 --> 00:12:35.820 to your neighbors. It's the messy, pre -scientific 00:12:35.820 --> 00:12:39.320 soup we all swim in. For 30 years, Husserl tried 00:12:39.320 --> 00:12:41.879 to float above it. And now at the end, he says, 00:12:42.100 --> 00:12:45.200 actually, all science is rooted in this life 00:12:45.200 --> 00:12:48.840 world. It feels like a capitulation. It's a chicken 00:12:48.840 --> 00:12:51.419 and egg problem. If the transcendental ego is 00:12:51.419 --> 00:12:53.639 supposed to constitute the world, how can it 00:12:53.639 --> 00:12:56.100 be rooted in the world? It's not a capitulation. 00:12:56.500 --> 00:12:59.600 It's a deepening of the argument. He's saying 00:12:59.600 --> 00:13:02.799 that modern science, from Galileo to today, has 00:13:02.799 --> 00:13:05.759 committed a fatal error. They mistook the map 00:13:05.759 --> 00:13:08.389 for the territory. They looked at mathematical 00:13:08.389 --> 00:13:11.210 formulas and said, that is reality. And they 00:13:11.210 --> 00:13:13.610 looked at human experience and said, that is 00:13:13.610 --> 00:13:16.570 just subjective fluff. Husserl is arguing that 00:13:16.570 --> 00:13:18.870 the mathematical formulas come from the life 00:13:18.870 --> 00:13:21.450 world. You can't have geometry without a guy 00:13:21.450 --> 00:13:24.509 first measuring a field with a rope. He was trying 00:13:24.509 --> 00:13:27.230 to reconnect abstract science with human meaning. 00:13:27.509 --> 00:13:30.529 He was warning us, if science forgets the human 00:13:30.529 --> 00:13:33.970 subject, it becomes a soulless machine. And, 00:13:33.970 --> 00:13:36.509 I mean, looking at the 20th century, was he wrong? 00:13:37.169 --> 00:13:40.190 Soulless machines. Well, that's a perfect segue 00:13:40.190 --> 00:13:42.870 to the betrayal, isn't it? We can't talk about 00:13:42.870 --> 00:13:45.129 Husserl's legacy without talking about the prodigal 00:13:45.129 --> 00:13:49.090 son, Martin Heidegger. Ugh. The most painful 00:13:49.090 --> 00:13:51.990 chapter in philosophical history. It wasn't just 00:13:51.990 --> 00:13:54.730 professional. It was personal. Heidegger was 00:13:54.730 --> 00:13:57.889 his assistant. Husserl called him the phenomenon 00:13:57.889 --> 00:14:00.830 of phenomenology. He thought he had found his 00:14:00.830 --> 00:14:03.149 heir. He handed him the keys to the kingdom. 00:14:03.370 --> 00:14:05.909 And what did Heidegger do? He took Husserl's 00:14:05.909 --> 00:14:08.919 method. the analysis of experience, and completely 00:14:08.919 --> 00:14:11.879 gutted the transcendental ego. He turned it into 00:14:11.879 --> 00:14:15.259 anthropology. He turned it into reality. Heidegger 00:14:15.259 --> 00:14:18.379 said, Edmund, there is no pure ego floating in 00:14:18.379 --> 00:14:20.779 a void looking at the world. There is only Dyson, 00:14:21.059 --> 00:14:24.120 being in the world. We are thrown into this mess. 00:14:24.299 --> 00:14:26.779 We are coping with anxiety, with tools that break, 00:14:26.919 --> 00:14:28.820 with the fact that we're going to die. We aren't 00:14:28.820 --> 00:14:31.399 spectators. We are participants. And Hosterl 00:14:31.399 --> 00:14:34.419 hated it. He read Being in Time and scribbled 00:14:34.419 --> 00:14:37.929 furiously in the margins. He felt, rightly, I 00:14:37.929 --> 00:14:41.169 think, that Heidegger had relapsed into psychologism. 00:14:41.470 --> 00:14:44.070 Heidegger made philosophy about human existence 00:14:44.070 --> 00:14:46.870 rather than absolute truth. And the betrayal 00:14:46.870 --> 00:14:49.690 wasn't just in the text. When the Nazis took 00:14:49.690 --> 00:14:52.070 power, Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg 00:14:52.070 --> 00:14:54.470 University. The man who was supposed to carry 00:14:54.470 --> 00:14:56.789 the torch of pure reason ended up signing letters 00:14:56.789 --> 00:15:00.490 with Heil Hitler. And Husserl, a Jew by birth, 00:15:00.690 --> 00:15:03.769 was isolated, banned from the library he held 00:15:03.769 --> 00:15:06.730 build. This is tragic, but we have to separate 00:15:06.730 --> 00:15:09.549 the politics from the philosophy here. Heidegger's 00:15:09.549 --> 00:15:12.629 critique stuck because it felt true. Husserl 00:15:12.629 --> 00:15:14.929 wanted us to be angels, viewing the world from 00:15:14.929 --> 00:15:18.049 nowhere. Heidegger admitted we are mud, viewing 00:15:18.049 --> 00:15:21.490 the world from right here. But notice this. Heidegger 00:15:21.490 --> 00:15:23.710 couldn't have written a single page of being 00:15:23.710 --> 00:15:26.929 in time without Husserl's tools. The concept 00:15:26.929 --> 00:15:30.350 of world, of being with others, of disclosure, 00:15:30.690 --> 00:15:34.049 it's all modified Husserlian code. Hustle built 00:15:34.049 --> 00:15:36.629 the operating system that Heidegger used to run 00:15:36.629 --> 00:15:39.789 his own program. Even in his rejection, Heidegger 00:15:39.789 --> 00:15:42.289 was a phenomenologist. That I will grant you. 00:15:42.429 --> 00:15:45.409 Hustle changed the vocabulary forever. You can't 00:15:45.409 --> 00:15:48.350 do modern philosophy or psychology or even cognitive 00:15:48.350 --> 00:15:50.649 science without bumping into intentionality. 00:15:50.889 --> 00:15:54.110 Exactly. And I think in our modern era, Hustle 00:15:54.110 --> 00:15:56.850 is more relevant than ever. We are living in 00:15:56.850 --> 00:16:00.070 a time of deep fakes of AI, of algorithms that 00:16:00.070 --> 00:16:03.000 curate our reality. The natural attitude today 00:16:03.000 --> 00:16:06.700 is trusting the screen, trusting the feed. Hussle's 00:16:06.700 --> 00:16:09.340 demand that we stop and analyze how reality is 00:16:09.340 --> 00:16:11.860 being presented to us is the critical skill of 00:16:11.860 --> 00:16:15.039 the 21st century. We need to be transcendental 00:16:15.039 --> 00:16:17.460 egos, or we're just going to be data points. 00:16:17.779 --> 00:16:20.679 That's a noble pitch, but I still land on the 00:16:20.679 --> 00:16:23.059 side of the realist. I think there is a hard 00:16:23.059 --> 00:16:26.379 reality out there, biological, physical, historical, 00:16:26.700 --> 00:16:29.519 that doesn't give a damn about my transcendental 00:16:29.519 --> 00:16:32.639 reduction. I think we need to look outward, not 00:16:32.639 --> 00:16:35.500 inward. Bracketing the world feels safe, but 00:16:35.500 --> 00:16:38.039 eventually the bracket breaks. And I think that 00:16:38.039 --> 00:16:40.120 without the inward look, the outward look is 00:16:40.120 --> 00:16:42.639 blind. You're just measuring shadows if you don't 00:16:42.639 --> 00:16:44.679 understand the light source. Well, we've certainly 00:16:44.679 --> 00:16:47.659 bracketed enough for one day. It's a dense topic, 00:16:47.679 --> 00:16:49.539 and I'm sure our listeners are currently performing 00:16:49.539 --> 00:16:51.980 a reduction on their own headaches. A headache 00:16:51.980 --> 00:16:55.019 is a phenomenon, too. Analyze it. I'll pop an 00:16:55.019 --> 00:16:57.960 aspirin instead. Thanks. That's the natural attitude 00:16:57.960 --> 00:17:00.799 for you. Fair enough. To our listeners, thank 00:17:00.799 --> 00:17:02.940 you for joining us on this dive into the mind 00:17:02.940 --> 00:17:05.559 of Edmund Husserl. Whether you are a realist 00:17:05.559 --> 00:17:08.619 or an idealist, remember, the world is only there 00:17:08.619 --> 00:17:11.519 because you are there to witness it. Or maybe 00:17:11.519 --> 00:17:13.960 it's there anyway. Until next time, goodbye.