Giorgio Jules Mastrobisi

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ESSENCE OF RELATIVITY. MATTERS CONCERNING THE BORDER BETWEEN HUSSERL AND EINSTEIN According to Hermann Weyl, Einstein’s Relativity Theory is a method that combines “analysis of essence” and “mathematical construction”. From this point of view, in this article I try to establish a parallelism between the formulation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Husserl’s Phenomenology based on the comparison of the original texts and manuscripts. From this analysis, e.g. the conception of the gravitational field, as important result of the General Relativity Theory, seems to be nothing else but a new type of “essence”, a phenomenological essence, in an environing objective world that is the “world‐of‐life”. In this world, pre‐ scientific world of the everyday life experience, the reality is given us as a relativistic reality dependent on the subjective activity of the individual knowers. On the basis of the consciousness data, we reconstruct the real and objective world of experience as starting point for every mathematical and physical construction of the world comprehension. This study seeks to present a convincing case both that Husserlian phenomenology influenced 20th Century natural science in an important way.

This paper aims to explain how the insights Weyl gleaned from Husserl played an important role in his scientific work, and then how Einstein’s major work exhibit important parallels to Weyl’s work, thereby establishing phenomenology both as an indirect historical influence and a systematic underpinning for Einstein’s work in theoretical physics. In so doing, this paper seeks to show how some of the most basic problems that Einstein addresses have a kinship not just to problems addressed in a completely different context by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and his circle, but also to perennial problems in ontology and epistemology that go back to Kant, Hume and Leibniz. The conclusion seems to suggest that it not only shows how phenomenology both historically and systematically provides a backdrop for Einstein’s work; my thesis actually situates issues in twentieth-century scientific thought against the backdrop of a philosophical development, and perhaps the most original idea of this study consists not just in showing how phenomenology influenced Einstein, but also how Einstein’s work on relativity had an important influence on the work of Edmund Husserl in Crisis of European Sciences and in his later works.

This paper claims that there is an epistemological evidence of an unavoidable gap between purely formal sciences (sciences of essences) and the empirical sciences for which they provide the foundation. A second key theme is the way that all empirical sciences are grounded in a pure science of essences. At the same time, I endeavour to explain how the insights Weyl gleaned from Husserl played an important role in his scientific work, and to show how Einstein’s major work exhibit important parallels to Weyl’s work, thereby establishing phenomenology both as an indirect historical influence and a systematic underpinning for Einstein’s work in theoretical physics. In so doing, this paper seeks to show how some of the most basic problems that Einstein addresses have a kinship not just to problems addressed in a completely different context by Husserl and his circle, but also to perennial problems in ontology and epistemology that go back to Kant, Hume and Leibniz. The conclusion highlights how phenomenology influenced Einstein, but also how Einstein’s work on relativity had an important influence on the work of the most important phenomenologist of the twentieth century, namely Husserl in his Crisis of European Sciences.