Edmund Husserl on Tradition

Abstract

The article we wish to propose concerns the concept of tradition as described in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften. The subject of this study is the fruition of the tradition, rather than the description of its constitution. Tradition always appears to be a stratum of sense inherent in a cultural object (Kultur-Sache) that shows itself as having sense or as stratification of senses handed down through time. The object, either concrete or ideal, has a certain sense that always appears to be already traditionally fixed. In order to understand how this is possible, we apply the notion of Wertnehmung (value-perception), as we can find in the second book of the Ideas pertaining to a pure Phenomenology and a phenomenological Philosophy (§ 4) to the theme of tradition. Husserl finds a solution to the problem of the couple “present of the perception” – “time of the tradition” by taking these as two different aspects of the same sense that the object has now.

By means of the notion of horizon, Husserl can apply to the tradition the same possibility to be interrogated. In the case of the tradition, this means that we should reactivate the meanings fixed as sedimentation by the operations of Sinngebung to highlight all the generative strata behind the present sense of a cultural object.