Abstract
This paper investigates phenomenological philosophy as the critical consciousness of modernity beginning from that point in the Vienna Lecture where Husserl discounts Papuans and Gypsies, and includes America, in defining Europe as the spiritual home of reason. Its meaning is analyzed through the introduction of the concept of institution (Urstiftung) in Crisis to argue that the historical fact of encounter with America can be seen as an event for reason insofar as the encounter includes elements previously absent in the European entelechy. The conclusion shows that phenomenology must become a comparative, Socratic, diagnosis of the planetary crisis of reason. The entelechy of reason that becomes evident through the concept of institution should be understood less as a renewal of a pre-existing tradition than as an exogenic encounter and incursion of an outside that together define an instituting event as new in relation to its tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
Both Gregory Cameron and Rodolphe Gasché emphasize that Husserl’s concept of Europe as the institutionalization of the entelechy of reason functions as a critique of actual Europe (Cameron, 107; Gasché, 21–2).
- 2.
Insofar as Husserl’s 1935 letter to Levy-Bruhl indicates that his anthropology was one of the sources of Husserl’s concept of lifeworld, this concern gains greater justification. Levy-Bruhl’s conception of non-Western people as “pre-logical,” “primitive” and “without history” suggests a hierarchical relation that Husserl might have seen himself as giving a philosophical foundation with the idea of Europe as philosophy’s home (Husserl 2008). In historical-intellectual terms, it is probably some such combination of 19th and early twentieth century anthropology with the nineteenth century idea of progress that motivated Husserl’s view. But no such ease is available to us at this juncture.
- 3.
Rodolphe Gasché goes so far as to assert that all critique of Eurocentrism depends on a European concept of critique, a position that not only fails to address directly the issue at hand but re-asserts the Husserlian position as if it were unproblematic (Gasché 7).
- 4.
Urstiftung may also be translated as “primal institution” or simply “institution” as it was by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty 1970, chapter 5; Merleau-Ponty 1962, 59). Aron Gurwitsch used the term “institutive inception” (Moran, 61, n23). The advantage of the term “institution” is that it can be used in two senses, both of which are relevant to the concept: it is both an establishing and a persisting structuring. Something is “instituted” in the primal sense of being brought into being and something is an “institution” in the sense of a persistent organized structure within which intersubjective relations and material culture are organized. In his Guide for Translating Husserl (1973) Dorion Cairns suggests that Urstiftung should be translated as “primal instituting” or “primal institution” in distinction from Stiftung for which he suggests “institution, instituting, something instituted, origination” but not “foundation” (Cairns, 119).
- 5.
Such as, for example, Gregory Cameron and Rodolphe Gasché (Cameron, 107; Gasché, 57). The work of Jacques Derrida has been significant, and highly influential, in arguing that an equivocation between reason as constituted in history and given only as its telos defines Husserl’s turn to history. This argument for equivocation rests on the duality of empirical-transcendental, or contingent-necessary, that the concept of institution overcomes (Derrida 2003, 176–8; Derrida 1978, 121).
- 6.
Derrida’s argument for an equivocation in Husserl is one the bases for his claim that such equivocations are unavoidable for philosophy and an entry into his own philosophy through the concept of “delay.” He analyzes the supposedly necessary equivocation between empirical and transcendental as delay, connects delay and repetition to writing (as did Husserl), argues that Husserl is caught in a metaphysics of presence based on an auto-affection of the spoken voice, and introduces his own connection of delay to writing and difference (Derrida 1978, 150–3; Derrida 1973, 80–2).
- 7.
Enrique Dussel objects to the term “encounter” because “the new syncretistic, hybrid, predominantly mestizo culture was born neither from a freely entered alliance nor from steady cultural synthesis, but from an originary trauma of being dominated” (Dussel 1992, 55). While Dussel is correct to say that “encounter” does not capture the essence of the historical event insofar as it was not an “encounter” of equals, I have used it as a way of opening up a free variation of the possibilities of the event without denying the originary trauma in order to open contemporary rethinking and, perhaps, alternatives.
- 8.
Jan Patočka agreed with Husserl’s conception of the entelechy of reason as essentially tied to the European spirit but went on to claim that the export of reason might therefore do a violence to other civilizations (Patočka, 221–2).
- 9.
As Dermot Moran has shown, Husserl does not in principle deny the possibility of critical reason to non-European peoples. Rather, “Husserl undoubtedly embraced the view that all cultures begin in some kind of non-historical, practical mythic stage before becoming historically differentiated. … there is no evidence that Husserl thinks that Indian or Chinese civilizations are essentially incapable of making the breakthrough from myth to the theoretical attitude, originally performed by “a few Greek eccentrics.” It is the great and irrational “fact” of history that this breakthrough took place only in Greece” (Moran 493–4).
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Angus, I. (2020). Husserl and America: Reflections on the Limits of Europe as the Ground of Meaning and Value for Phenomenology. In: Apostolescu, I. (eds) The Subject(s) of Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 108. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29357-4_16
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