In his 1922/1923 articles for the Japanese magazine Kaizō, Edmund Husserl identifies a particular “humanity” or human culture by the purposeful idea [Zweckidee] consciously embraced by the community. This purposeful idea is attained through rational self-formation on the part of the community in a manner analogous to the rational self-formation of the individual human being. Thereafter, it can be referenced to distinguish different cultures (or stages of cultural development) from one another through its objective manifestation in communal groups and cultural products, as Husserl retraces in a historical account of the development of Western history. This paper explores the essential character of this conception of the purposeful idea from both an exegetical and a systematic perspective, examining in particular the relationship between such an idea and the values experienced by individual subjects within a culture (which are, according to Husserl, also available at the level of objective culture in relation to a communal subject). The paper argues that Husserl’s basic conception of the purposeful idea is a good model for understanding certain essential characteristics of cultural constitution in general, although some of his fundamental assumptions—especially the strict identity he attempts to establish between a purposeful idea as such and the specific goal of universal, rational self-understanding—turn out to be somewhat more questionable in light of the connection between the purposeful idea and the genuinely felt values underlying it.

埃德蒙·胡塞尔 (Edmund Husserl ) 在 1922/1923 年为日本杂志Kaizō发表的文章中，通过社会有意识地接受的有目的的想法 [ Zweckidee ] 来识别特定的“人性”或人类文化。这种有目的的想法是通过社区的理性自我形成来实现的，其方式类似于个人的理性自我形成。此后，正如胡塞尔在西方历史发展的历史叙述中所回顾的那样，它可以通过其在公共群体和文化产品中的客观表现来区分不同的文化（或文化发展的阶段）。本文从解释学和系统的角度探讨了这种有目的的观念概念的本质特征，特别考察了这种观念与文化中个体主体所经历的价值观之间的关系（根据胡塞尔的说法，这些价值观也是在与公共主题相关的客观文化层面上可用）。本文认为，胡塞尔关于有目的的观念的基本概念是理解一般文化构成的某些基本特征的一个很好的模型，尽管他的一些基本假设——尤其是他试图在有目的的观念本身和具体的文化构成之间建立严格的同一性。普遍的、理性的自我理解的目标——鉴于有目的的想法和其背后真正感受到的价值观之间的联系，结果显得更加可疑。