[Encyclios]

The reaction to positivism

For H. Bergson, on the other hand, philosophy is not a generalizing science, nor a reflection on the sciences, but a mental operation that puts us in a different relationship with things rather than the one in which science places us. Philosophy and science do not compete in grasping reality, but, if anything, they collaborate because they refer to two fundamental aspects of reality itself. Science and metaphysics – says Bergson – have different subjects: «to science the matter and to metaphysics the spirit». But science and metaphysics have intuition in common, which grasps reality in its fullness: in fact, for what they have of essential, in their authentic discoveries, they have proceeded by intuition.

It is the atmosphere of the reaction to positivism, a reaction that reclaims the autonomy of philosophy and seeks a way of approaching reality that is not the generalizing one of law and of type. For W. Windelband as well, philosophy has its own sphere of autonomy as a critical science of universally valid values.

In E. Husserl, the idea of philosophy as a rigorous science reemerges: the essences, which according to his method are intuited, are neither facts nor abstractions taken from facts, but have the characteristic of purity, comparable to mathematical notions. Therefore, a strong anti-relativistic accent, and yet a strong anti-objectivist accent: the objectivism of science has something dogmatic if it claims to exhaust the understood object. Before objectification there is a smooth process, there is the world of life, which is the presupposition of objectification.