What Is Reason? Thinking It Anew

We can now better understand the deep significance of the moving avowal Husserl entrusts to a diary note in 1906 (Chap. 3 , Sect. 4 ), where Husserl resumes, as if before God and not in the style of a cv, the essential motivations that had led him across the domains of experimental psychology, arithmetics, and logic. The completion and publication of the Logical Investigations, in the full maturity of his 40 years, Husserl remarks, had finally given a little stability to his interior life that would show “an innermost unity “ from then onwards.” Recall, it was a matter of life or death. “Death” was the achievement of that illusory jump beyond the bonds of truth and falsity, good and evil, that kept being suggested by the “devilish” spirit of a skepticism gone professional, and turned to nihilism. Husserl very well describes the agony of a philosopher struggling against that “death,” which is at once of both soul and mind, threatening the moral and spiritual life and the theoretical life at one blow: