Husserl and Galileo Notes on ‘The Crisis of European Sciences’

Abstract

Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences (1934–1938) diagnoses modern science as estranged from the concrete world of human experience—the Lebenswelt. He identifies Galileo Galilei as the “discovering and concealing genius” whose mathematization of nature produced a science methodologically powerful yet existentially hollow, abstracting from lived experience to deal in idealities. Husserl offers phenomenology as a corrective, restoring subjectivity to the foundations of knowledge. His challenge remains pressing in fields such as neuropsychopharmacology, where subjective states are central but resist quantification. Scientific instruments capture correlates yet miss the lived essence, sometimes distorting method
by equating nonpathological drug states with psychosis—a category mistake that treats experience as reducible to measurement. In this essay, I argue that Husserl mischaracterizes Galileo. The basis of modern science lies not in mathematization but rather in Galileo’s invention of the experiment as a cycle of imaginative framing, controlled intervention, and theoretical revision. Mathematics reifies, linearizes, and quantifies thoughts that would otherwise remain intuitive and
confused. Galileo’s pragmatic view of causality—as manipulable conditions rather than metaphysical essences—grounds modern experimental logic. Giambattista Vico later reformulated this idea as verum esse ipsum factum: the true is what is made (done). Galileo thus unified imagination, mathematics, and lived practice, even as Husserl’s concern about science’s neglect of subjectivity endures.