Abstract
Can one meaningfully speak of “an existential Husserl”? The aim of this paper is to explore the indigenous existential concerns of Husserl’s ethical thinking after the First World War by focusing on his “Freiburg Manuscripts.” In these reflections, Husserl re-frames the “imaginative destruction of the world,” a centerpiece for the phenomenological method of suspension and reduction, in ethical terms. In doing so, he poses the questions: Is it possible to strive to become an ethical person if one cannot assure oneself of the ethical meaningfulness of the world? Would I still want to be an ethical person in a world that is hell? Can I even live in a meaningless world? In response to this haunting of ethical life by the specter of its own impossibility, Husserl develops his novel doctrine of absolute values, the affective basis of ethical imperatives, the significance of what we care about, and the idea of the autonomy of freedom as grounded in the self-responsibility of an ethical person and their responsiveness to their chosen values.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
As Shestov writes: “But, despite everything, it is not given to rationalism, with all its ‘arguments deduced from consequences’ and its threats of confinement in the madhouse, to choke in the heart of men the obscure feeling persisting there that the final truth, the truth which our ancestors sought unsuccessfully in Paradise, is found epkeina noû kai noêseôs, beyond reason and what can be conceived by reason, and that it is impossible to discover it in the immobile and dead universe which is the only one over which rationalism can rule as sovereign.” http://www.shestov.phonoarchive.org/pc/pc32_9.html
- 3.
For this expression and interpretation, I am grateful to Claudio Majolino. See Majolino 2016.
- 4.
Critique of Pure Reason, A 100–101.
- 5.
As Majolino writes: “We can be surprised within the world, but not by the world” (Majolino 2016, 173).
- 6.
From Husserl’s point of view, because he thinks that natural laws are contingent, this does not preclude a world in which regularity would be more capricious, indeed, a world in which scientific laws would be impossible, and yet, some form of regularity could still obtain, or regularity in brief intervals of time and space.
- 7.
The German expression “da” can also be rendered as “there.”
- 8.
See Frankfurt 1998.
References
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de Warren, N. (2022). “Mag die Welt eine Hölle sein”: Husserl’s Existential Ethics. In: Cavallaro, M., Heffernan, G. (eds) The Existential Husserl. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 120. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05095-4_4
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