THE CRISIS AS A BANK RUPTCY OF TRUST: THE FIDUCIARY ATTITUDE,HUMAN NATURE AND ETHICAL SCIENCE

Abstract

Edmund Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences prompts the search for an alternative to the development of nihilistic social systems which arise out of this situation. The breadth of the crisis problem manifesting itself in all realms of culture, including not only the natural sciences, but even art and music is first outlined, followed by a general definition which includes those found in Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Florian Znaniecki. Husserl's phenomenological and first depth analyses of the crisis, theoretically and historically tracing it back to its mathematical-natural scientific origins, are briefly considered until they break off around the problem of intersubjectivity, which he first discovered around the turn of the century. Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap are then seen to attempt to dissolve this problem into a logical mystical intersubjectivity so as to maintain that there was never really a scientific crisis of the sciences and never one calling for such a notion. Finally, the works of Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, as an extension of the original Husserlian intuition with their consideration of intersubjectivity now as `a mundane problem of the natural attitude' of the everyday social group, are taken up as a guide in this search for the non-nihilistic (aliquid).

Through an independent description of a `fiduciary attitude' (i.e. a trustful and not necessarily practical attitude), new light is thrown on the crisis as essentially a `bankruptcy of trust', and a brief attempt is then made to describe our most profound and foundational fiduciary engagement in that primordial `something' which is seen to be in the end a very `human nature'. Upon this basis, and more specifically upon a fiduciary familiar milieu of social nature, I must simply have faith carrying hopes and fears in the world. This is the basis for a trustfully grounded science in everyday life. It may be developed by `well-informed actors' into a modern higher reflection involving a supreme respect for the unknown in the other and in nature, so as to give rise to an ethical science guided by faith in the future advancement of our one single international world.