Is Husserl’s Antinaturalism up to Date? A Critical Review of the Contemporary Attempts to Mathematize Phenomenology

Since the end of the last century, there has been several ambitious attempts to naturalize Husserlian phenomenology by way of mathematization. To justify themselves in view of Husserl’s adamant antinaturalism, many of these attempts appeal to the new physico-mathematical tools that were unknown in Husserl’s time and thus allegedly make his position outdated. This paper critically addresses these mathematization proposals and aims to show that Husserl had, in fact, sufficiently good arguments that make his antinaturalistic position sound even today. The starting point of the discussion presented in this paper is the mathematization project introduced by Jean-Michel Roy, Jean Petitot, Bernard Pachoud, and Francisco Varela in their introduction to the book Naturalizing Phenomenology (Stanford University Press, 1999). This proposal was followed by a number of critiques but also by several alternative naturalization attempts clearly inspired by Roy et al.’s ambitious project. The review of some of Husserl’s important arguments often overlooked or misinterpreted by both the naturalization advocates and their critics leads the author of the paper to the twofold conclusion which, on the one hand, explores the deeper reasons for the impossibility of a physical and mathematical treatment of phenomenology, on the other hand, clarifies the sense in which such treatments are possible, namely by way of restriction of the variety of experiential aspects that undergo naturalization and substitution of the aspects amenable to the direct mathematization for the directly unmathematizable ones. In the fourth section of this paper, the author attempts to demonstrate that, contrary to widespread belief, Husserl’s arguments are not obsolete by the standards of the contemporary physico-mathematical approaches employed in the mathematization of phenomenology and indeed stand the test of time.