Phenomenology of Life and the New Critique of Reason: From Husserl’s Philosophy to the Phenomenology of Life and of the Human Condition

Abstract

The philosophy of life waited for two thousand years, as Julian Marias pointed out, to get off the ground. Already hinted at by Dilthey, it surged with the philosophies of Miguel de Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset. Both of these Spanish thinkers brought forth profound intuitions and insights in their own original fashions. Unamuno believed that lyrical meditation and a poetic, literary, and not an intellectual discursive, form of colloquy is the best way to frame and communicate the profound experience of life. Ortega also took the free literary, evocative stance although in places he attempted to articulate certain areas of his thought in a scholarly fashion. Nevertheless, in order to preserve the original freshness of his intuitions he shunned exfoliating them in a traditional philosophical discourse. Both thinkers are certainly justified in this refusal to identify philosophy with a pseudo-scientific and strictly rational approach and mode of expression. And yet despite the many perils of giving a formal articulation to the profound inspirations which plunging into the depths of the question concerning life stirs — especially the danger of falsely framing the original life-pulsating insights into traditional and, in their understanding, stultified forms — there is incontestable merit in trying to discover discrete articulations among the elements of the process of becoming as well as those of the fleeting givenness that an inquiry into the immense complexity of life may offer.