Abstract
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.
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Notes
As is customary, I will refer in this article to the various volumes of the Husserliana by the abbreviation Hua and the relevant volume number.
Cf., e.g., Ernst Wolfgang Orth’s (1993) “Interkulturalität und Inter-Intentionalität.” While this criticism, as I will discuss, is not entirely unfounded, it runs the risk of overlooking Husserl’s genuinely important contributions in this field—a point that Orth, for one, is entirely willing to admit.
Granted, the Kaizō articles are by no means the only place in which Husserl grapples with the notion of human culture (though they may well represent his clearest discussion of the subject). For example, the texts from Husserl’s literary estate collected as Die Lebenswelt (Hua XXXIX) contain a great deal of interesting (albeit rather scattered) speculation on this topic. For a parallel example of Husserl’s discussion of the development of human culture—and the lifeworld as a whole—from the notion of “tradition,” cf. Hua XXXIX: 519ff. Nonetheless, for the sake of clarity and due to the limitations of space, the focus of this article will remain primarily on Husserl’s conception of culture in the Kaizō articles, with hints elsewhere in his corpus brought in where helpful or used to point the way towards future possibilities in this field of research.
All translations from German-language sources are my own.
For a more complete discussion of Husserl’s thought on values and its systematic implications, see my book Towards a Phenomenology of Values: Investigations of Worth (Hobbs, 2022), especially Chapters 1 and 2. The basic approach to values taken by that text serves as a backdrop for the present investigation.
Note that the height of a value is different from the intensity with which the value is felt; a particular sensual value, for instance, might be experienced as more intense than a value of moral obligation, but the individual might nevertheless choose to act in ways that promote the latter over the former due to its greater height and correspondingly greater valuative attraction.
On this central term in Husserl, see Andrea Staiti’s (2013) “A Grasp from Afar: Überschau and the Givenness of Life in Husserlian Phenomenology.”
On the connections among the ethical development of the human being, reason, and the process of self-cultivation in Husserl, cf., e.g., Hua XLII: 441ff., and for a historical and systematic account of the development of such considerations in Husserl’s ethical thought, cf. the insightful fourth chapter of Janet Donohoe’s (2004) Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity.
As Husserl puts it, completeness is inherent in every purposeful idea—indeed, there is a sense in which such completeness is the purposeful idea, given its requirement for universality—but “the mere will to become complete does not attain all at once the completeness whose realization is bound up with the necessary form of an endless struggle, but also with a strengthening within the struggle” (Hua XXVII: 38).
Elsewhere, Husserl goes so far as to describe theoretical reason itself as a special variety or developed form of practical reason, indicating that it is always the world-involved, lifeworld-related aspects of reason that take precedence (cf. Hua XLII: 474). For further discussion of pre-theoretical reason and the way in which this notion softens the blow of Husserl’s quasi-rationalism in the context of values, cf. Hobbs (2022: 36–43).
Note that such a genuinely communal subject must, in a manner to be specified, go beyond the level of individual human beings engaging in intersubjective interaction with one another—itself a major topic of phenomenological investigation.
Granted, it is by no means uncontentious to describe a swathe of humanity as broad as Husserl’s “West” as a culture. The relations among various (possibly sub- or super-cultural) groupings such as western European culture, early 20th-century Germany, or even Husserl’s own background as a German-speaking Jew—not to mention the experiential structures governing those levels—are naturally complex and worthy of investigation in their own right. Nonetheless, since the present project is aimed primarily at exploring the underlying conditions of the specific (albeit, if Husserl’s arguments here hold true, essential) element of culture that we find in the purposeful idea, we will take Husserl at his word for now and examine what light this meta-cultural notion of “the West” can shed on the structures of cultural development as such.
The Kaizō articles are not the only place in which Husserl defends a similar account; cf., e.g., Hua XLII: 181ff.
Note that a purposeful idea must be more than merely an ideal; it must be the object of genuine volition on the part of the community that embraces it. This characteristic is one factor that, for Husserl, distinguishes the European Middle Ages from other, ostensibly less developed forms of religious culture. As he writes concerning the contents of the medieval purposeful idea: “They are not empty ideals, but rather purposes, in whose attainability in the course of time one believes and in contact with which one works gladly as a religious mission” (Hua XXVII: 71).
So too, in the context of modernity, can even the purposeful idea that Husserl ascribes to philosophy (specifically: to transcendental phenomenology) become instantiated in members of the philosophical community: “Philosophy itself is the objective precipitate of its wisdom, and thereby of the wisdom of the community itself; in it is documented the idea of legitimate community, and thus the purposeful idea that the community has formed for itself by way of its philosophical profession, and made ready in this objective form at any time to become actualized and to have a corresponding effect for any philosopher as an organ of the community (or for any re-understanding layperson as a member of the community)” (Hua XXVII: 54).
Naturally, it is significant that the process by which such a community of will is developed is a task that occurs in history and features the participation of the particular human beings who will be members of the community. Only with such integral participation can the higher meaning of a genuine culture come into effect. Husserl characterizes the result of this process clearly in the Lebenswelt text: “Thereby, humanity and the individual human being, as a functioning member thereof, receive a new, a higher meaning, and thereby the world [receives such a meaning] as a cultural world that exists for him, from him. History is thus not an arbitrary piece of the cultural world but rather a constitutive accomplishment that arises within humanity … which from the prehistoric world … creates a new world, a world of higher meaning” (Hua XXXIX: 539).
For further—albeit still rather preliminary—discussion of the notion of cultural objects, their evolution, and their distinction from other (perhaps “lifeless”) objects in Husserl, cf. Hua XXXIX: 426ff.
Cf. Husserl’s early lectures on ethics and value-theory, Hua XXVIII, for his initial division of consciousness as such into these three distinct modes, although this notion is taken up and modified throughout his subsequent work.
A substantial amount of research has focused on the broad scope of Husserl’s conception of reason in recent years. For just one further example of Husserl’s nuanced views on this topic, particularly in the context of difficulties raised by Husserl’s critique of a reductive conception of rationality in the Crisis, see Thomas Nenon’s (2014) “Husserls antirationalistische Bestimmung der Vernunft.” Nenon’s work also touches at least briefly on the relation between the topic of reason and the issues of human culture discussed here, given the relevance of the Crisis to the possibility of renewal highlighted in the Kaizō articles.
Later in the Kaizō articles, Husserl develops this point further by identifying a society that embraces his own conception of philosophy as rigorous science specifically as a “higher value-form” of genuine humanity towards which the ethical ideal as such continually tends; cf. Hua XXVII: 54ff.
For a more detailed discussion and defense of this claim, see Hobbs (2022), particularly Chapter 1.
“Here I stand. I can do no other.” The historical details of this claim, not to mention its specific theological or socio-political content, need not concern us here. My use of this example is intended solely to illustrate a phenomenological point concerning valuative consciousness as such.
A cathedral, to return to an earlier example, is not merely a physical structure built in accordance with a rational plan and for a rational purpose. In addition, it is a cultural product that instantiates genuinely communal feeling, both in terms of its construction (perhaps as a labor of love) and its continuing existence (as an object rooted in feelings of awe, of shared communal values and goals, etc.).
Granted, even in his more expansive work on values and feeling-consciousness, Husserl also continues to exhibit a tendency to extend reason as such—albeit in its pre-theoretical form—to the entirety of conscious experience in a way that might interfere with the genuinely sui generis character of values and the feeling-consciousness to which they are related. For an extended characterization of Husserl’s views on this point (and a defense of the sui generis character of valuative consciousness), see once again the first chapter of Hobbs (2022).
Cf. the work of Max Scheler, particularly on so-called “sacred” values. Discussions of this theme range throughout his famous Formalism, but for one particular example see Scheler (1973: 108ff.).
Cf. the recent work of Sebastian Luft on this possibility, e.g., several chapters in his 2011 Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology.
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Hobbs, D.J. Values, Purposeful Ideas, and Human Culture in Husserl’s Kaizō Articles. Husserl Stud 38, 335–358 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-022-09314-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-022-09314-4