Distinguished Academicians
Dear guests,

It is a great privilege and honor to deliver a welcoming speech at your scientific conference “Science and Art”, here, in the temple of sciences and arts. The honor is even greater given the fact that this conference is jointly organized and carried out with your academic colleagues from Germany.
Today’s event is another affirmation and continuation of the mutually cherished Macedonian-German friendship. We have excellent political, economical and overall cooperation between the Republic of Macedonia and the Federal Republic of Germany. Macedonia sees Germany as a strong partner in overcoming the hurdles and attaining our interests.
The excellent bilateral relations and cooperation contribute to the advancement of fruitful political dialogue, which I witnessed during my official visit to Germany last September, when we had an impressive meeting with President Horst Köhler, during which we also addressed science.
This conference reaffirms the fact that our two academic communities recognize the need for mutual cooperation and are prepared to combine knowledge and experience for the good of today’s and future generations. All over the world, science and art are spoken and interpreted with a universal language.
Since I have been given the floor, I cannot resist talking about the topic of today’s conference.
However, first I would like to express my respect for the supporters of the work of the great Leibniz. The last man from the western civilization with truly encyclopedical knowledge and founder and first president of your academy of sciences. When I was a university professor, I enjoyed his work, his universal knowledge, but, above all, his optimism.
Now, I would like to go back to the topic of science and art by reminding us all about a movement that appeared exactly 100 years ago in Germany. Namely, in 1910, certain appearances in German art and literature combined in a new movement called “expressionism”. The movement caused a “volcanic eruption”. For almost a decade it was boiling up and left a strong mark on German spiritual life. After 1920 the movement had weakened and retreated, making room for other aspirations in German society.
This, primarily literate and artistic movement, contains the protest against aestheticized and individualistic impressionism. Protest against social and political injustice, protest against the contemporary injustices.
Unlike impressionism, which actually paints the external look of nature and the world, expressionism shows the internal spirit stimulated by religious, social and psychological urges. However, expressionism contains an optimistic vision of the future.
Young artists and writers draw out the inspiration for their movement from the Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard.
What is, then, the essence of Kierkegaard’s philosophy?
Simply put, it represents a natural continuity of the new irrationalism, which among Germans could be traced back to Schelling and Schopenhauer.
Kierkegaard’s irrationalism stems from the animosity towards Hegel’s system. In the field of literature, this was boiled down to severe attack against Goethe. As subjectivist supporter, Kierkegaard resisted objective thought. According to him, objectivity reveals only trivial truths to us, or, at best, a mathematical formula. However, man can come to meaningful conclusions only through subjectivity.
Kierkegaard claims that subjectivity is the only truth, and, therefore, expressionists accepted this teaching. According to Kierkegaard, man comes close to understanding his existence in so-called border conditions, for instance, weakness and helplessness cause fear. For Kierkegaard, fear is a felling that overtakes man when facing the emptiness of his existence. Therefore, fear is an expression of the perfection of human nature. The deeper and more intensive fear is the more divine man is. And fear, in its various forms, is the dominant subject of an expressionist soul.
However, Kierkegaard’s understanding of life ultimately leads us to pessimism. Unlike Schopenhauer’s pessimistic irrationalism which culminates with ascetic denouncing each practice, Kierkegaard determinately emphasized human activity, which is why expressionists were inspired by him.
Now, what was the purpose of this story of German expressionism? Simply, this was necessary in order for us to get to their main philosopher. If Ernst Max is considered the philosopher of impressionism, then the former Freiburg professor Edmund Husserl is the philosopher of expressionism.
Today, Husserl is almost forgotten in western philosophy. His philosophical method’s irrationalistc tendencies became explicitly known only through Heidegger’s philosophy. Husserl’s goal was to create a system that could penetrate the essence of phenomena, regardless of physical or psychical reality. This is the reason why the method of the doctrine known as “intuition of essences” (“Wesensschau”), is intuitive and absolute knowledge, unlike the logical and psychological method. That is the goal of expressionists – phenomenologically to depict the world through art.
Husserl at that time, 100 years ago, merged his lectures in the, unfortunately, unfinished work known today as “The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”.
The purpose of this intro is for this work and the messages it conveys on sciences and arts.
Husserl says that modern European culture begun with enlightenment’s trust in the absolute power of knowledge. But this trust transformed into the contemporary crisis of science, crisis based on the fact that scientific knowledge has enslaved the human spirit. Instead of opening new perspectives of freedom, instead of providing its powerful services for the building of human freedom, sciences turned the human into a machine, into a part of the process creating technical power that chains the human.

Facing science’s alienation from man, the principle task of philosophy is to seek the genuine knowledge of human rationality. To seek the rationality that expresses man’s self-consciousness and freedom, and, based on it, to merge the entire scientific knowledge into one complex.
Therefore, phenomenology’s main goal is to achieve the self-awareness of science by recognizing the genuine possibilities of the human spirit by understanding the original purpose of the rationality of man’s conscience.
Unlike the technological rationalization of contemporary science, rationality aiming to more efficiently manipulate with nature, phenomenology should discover the genuine rationality of the human spirit expressing human freedom and self-awareness and man’s true possibilities.
Husserl envisioned phenomenology as a theory aiming to determine the sources of scientific cognition so that it could assist science in discovering its true purposes, to humanize itself, to develop critical barriers towards objectification of scientific knowledge that prevents them from reaching human purpose.
For a century, Husserl’s phenomenology has caused controversies. His existentionalist followers include Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, but also Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Roman Indargen and many others.
Husserl simply pointed out a century ago on what we have even today, vulgarization of science and its transformation into technology’s servant.
Recently, science is interested in researching German expressionism, in Germany, but also in the United States. Let us hope that this will produce a new Husserl that would depict the condition of sciences and arts today.