156
LIONEL ABEL
Theses on Feuerbach
found "insurmountable." Following Husser! and
Heidegger, Sartre devoted his effort to substituting anthropology for
physics as the privileged science and
to
replacing meta-physics with
meta-anthropology, that is to say, with an anthropology that is truly
philosophical.
For example, there is the question of our knowledge of other minds.
How, I wonder, can this question be dealt with by utilizing "the inten–
sive division of intellectual labor which the secure advance of knowledge
now requires"? There is the question of whether we are free or deter–
mined, responsible for our actions or not responsible for them. There
is the question of our relation to others, whatever our knowledge of
them may be. All such questions, according to Sartre, have to be dealt
with in terms of "lived experience." And Sartre, following Husser!, also
Heidegger, but Husser! mainly, has taken the view that what is under–
standable in terms of "lived experience" is truer that any deliverance of
the exact sciences. Moreover-though this is Husser!, perhaps, more
than Sartre-"lived experience" often has to be protected from the
deliverances of the exact sciences, which can be no truer than it is.
Husser! was even prepared to assert that the Copernican theory
was a distortion of experience, for in "lived experience" we are at rest
on the earth and do not circle the sun at a speed inexperienceable by
us. Perhaps Husser! went too far
in
this assertion. After all, when we
think of the earth we are thinking astronomically and not
in
terms of
"lived experience." And if we think in astronomical terms, we should
not deny the precision these terms make possible. Yet Husser! is right
in
a way, too, for in "lived experience" we do feel ourselves to be at rest
on whatever point of the earth we are. And this truth is quite as true as
the Copernican theory, though I concede its truth does not have to be
protected from that theory.
Husser!'s great insight, which Sartre has made his own, more or
less, is that we are in possession of far more important truths than we
ourselves may realize. This was Plato's insight, also Proust's. And it has
one great advantage: it helps one from being intimidated by the
scientists. And why should they intimidate us? Their knowledge rests
on ours.
Such knowledge of reality as we have or can have, without scientific
information, comes from "lived experience," insofar as we understand
it, or try to understand it. And what can be understood from "lived
experience" is more certain than any scientific theory, no matter how
well founded; more certain and more astonishing, too, than our measure–
ments of the sun, our analyses of its components, our most precise find-
