Abstract

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.