A True and Better “I” : Husserl’s Call for Worldly Renewal

Abstract

My article argues that Husserl’s late phenomenology centered on an ethics of worldly responsibility. This revision marked a considerable departure from the Brentanian axiology of his earlier seminars, and it introduced a new ēthos, never fully developed, of ethical engagement through philosophy. In Husserl’s twilight years, the world, not ego, received primary accent. This worldliness – outlined in the Kaizo essays of 1923–24, then buried under the egology of the late 1920s – reemerged in the 1930s Crisis work and surrounding manuscripts. Ostracized from Nazi society, a beleaguered Husserl raised worldly ethical concerns to new philosophical distinction, although he never wholly extricated them from either egological subjectivism or the well-known Cartesian mechanics of intersubjectivity. As a result, Husserl’s late ethics, like the Crisis text itself, is a potent but incomplete harbinger of new phenomenological lines. My essay also suggests how Husserl’s intellectual scion, Jan Patočka, appropriated and radicalized his mentor’s ethics in his own phenomenological activity, elevating worldly responsibility to the pinnacle of philosophical life.