The “Life-World” and the Axiological Approach in Ethics

Abstract

It is a happy coincidence that, on the occasion of the 17th International Congress of Phenomenology, we celebrate half a century since, in Husserl’s Vienna Lecture of May, 1935 (entitled The Crisis of European Human Existence and Philosophy) and in the series of lectures he subsequently gave in Prague (and from which he proceeded to write his famous posthumous work The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology), Husserl discerned the main source of the crisis in a crippled rationalism, “bogged down in naturalism and objectivism,” which lost its original links with the “life-world” and, consequently, its axiological dimension, its ability to appropriately control man’s valuing and practical reactions to the world. The above-mentioned texts, which maintain that the crisis can be overcome by a “heroism of reason,”¹ mark the climax of Husserl’s constant concern with outlining a sui generis humanistic ethics, apt to achieve unity between individual autonomy and collective responsibility, between homo cogitans, homo aestimans, and homo agens. This is what I shall attempt to demonstrate, or at least to suggest.