But the real crisis is internal to the sciences themselves, wherein their basic relationship to the subject matter which each of them investigates has become questionable. The basic relationship to the subject matters is becoming insecure, which activates the tendency to carry out a propaedeutic reflection on their basic structure. Such a reflection seeks to dispel the insecurity over the fundamental concepts of the science in question or to secure those concepts in a more original understanding of its subject matter. Genuine progress in the sciences occurs only in this field of reflection. Such crises do not take place in the historiological sciences only because they have not yet reached the degree of maturity necessary for revolutions.
The present crisis in all the sciences therefore stems from the burgeoning tendency in them to reclaim their particular domain of objects originally, to forge their way back to the field of subject matter which is thematizable in their research.
What task is incurred in this comprehensive crisis? What is to be accomplished? How is that possible?
The crisis can be directed in ways which are fruitful and secure for the sciences only if we are clear about its scientific and methodological sense and see that the exposition of the primary field of subject matter calls for a mode of experience and interpretation in principle different from those which prevail in the concrete sciences themselves. In crisis, scientific research assumes a philosophical cast. Sciences thus say that they are in need of an original interpretation which they themselves are incapable of carrying out.
We can demonstrate this succinctly and concretely by way of the following
series of particular sciences, chosen here to suit our purpose.
Characteristic is the crisis in contemporary mathematics, which is emphatically
characterized as a crisis of foundations. In the dispute between
formalism and intuitionism, the question is whether the fundaments of
the mathematical sciences are based upon formal propositions that
are simply assumed and that constitute a system of axioms from which
all the other propositions can be deduced. This is Hilbert's position.
The opposing direction, essentially influenced by phenomenology,
asks whether or not in the end what is primarily given is the specific
structure of the objects themselves (in geometry the continuum which
precedes scientific inquiry, for example, in integral and differential
analysis). This is the doctrine of Brouwer and Weyl. Thus, what is
In physics the revolution came by way of relativity theory, which has no other sense than the tendency to exhibit the original interconnectedness of nature insofar as this is independent of any analysis and