Derrida: Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry – Sections 1-3

GENERAL FIELD OF "Origin of Geometry": The last part of Husserl's career is devoted to an analysis of a "Crisis of European Humanity," as the title of the "Vienna Lecture" would have it. Crisis is the phenomenon of a culture whose science has grown too complex. In crisis, science has lost its meaning for the culture as a whole, has become an autonomous machine, whose results seem to have been simply waiting there to be discovered. Husserl wants then to reign in a runaway science that sparks the irrational and irresponsible responses of naturalism/psychologism/historicism, which gives up universal truth and settles for relativism or Platonism/objectivism by retrieving an original sense of science as a human endeavor. In these broad outlines we should compare Kant's critical project.