Reason and the Life-World

Abstract

The late philosophy of Husserl, his science of the life-world, seems ridden with paradox.¹ On the one hand phenomenology, because it is logos, reason freed from all subjugation to goals or ends in view, is the consummation of human existence; on the other, this science, to all appearances at any rate, accepts as primordial, genuine and “salutary” precisely the realm of doxa,² the essentially nonrational purpose-determined life-world. On the one hand it is an activity performed in radical methodological disengagement from the practical life of the “sphere of feelings and volitions” (Hu VII, 294), but on the other, it seems to take a “life-interest” in having a practical effect on European humanity, in saving it from its present crisis. Has Husserl, who to the very end ³ fought for the universal hegemony of reason, here none the less — and perhaps unbeknownst even to himself — fallen prey to tendencies of his time?

Citations from Husserl in this essay refer to the Gesammelte Werke (Husserliana, ed. H. L. van Breda, Den Haag, 1950 ff.) with the exception of two separately published works: Formale und Transzendentale Logik (Halle, 1929), and Erfahrung und Urteil (Hamburg, 1948).