RESUMO 36 | COMUNICAÇÕES

Empathy, Culture and Historicity: Husserl in Dilthey, Dilthey in Husserl

QUINTANA, Mauricio Guillermo Troncoso | Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile

The central topic of this work is to highlight one of the common points in the methodology of these two philosophers who have set the ground of the contemporary philosophical thinking. The central problem may be articulated throught he following questions: How can we give a rational account of the alterity of one cultural objectivity? And how can were cognizean “alien” (Fremde) from a different culture?

Both, Husserl and Dilthey, put every effort in their work to overcome the great danger that is represented by naturalism; their philosophies coincide in refuting the skeptical relativism (using in this context the notion that Husserl) occupies in the Logische Untersuchungen; later in the polemic work Philosophie als Strenge, specifically in the critic directed to the philosophies as world-representation (Weltanschauung), the concept psychologism will be developed as a form of naturalism. Like every type of relativism, this specific kind of naturalism leads to falsifying the idea of truth, and it’s an absolute threat to the rational development of sciences and philosophy. In a first moment, Husserl placed the philosophy of Dilthey in this category, but thanks to the epistolary material and thanks to the theoretical work reflected in their writings, we can learn that both of these philosophers were concerned with the same problem and the so-called polemic is only a sign of a companionship relation. Maybe, the more explicit evidence we can find, at the philosophical level, is the style of inquiry that Husserl develops in the phenomenological work: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie.

How can these two philosophers help us to understand the problems tated above?

In this work I will try tohigh light the constructive relationship between the husserlian phenomenology and the philosophy of history of Dilthey, in the following topics:

a) The common problem of psychologism.

b) The method of empathy in order to analyze cultural objectivities.

c) The relation between the historical world and the life world.

The methodology that I will use consist in identifying the operational concepts that underlie the points we have mentioned above (a to c). To do this I will use the text Die geistige Welt, a writing that is highly influenced by Husserl, and Einleitung in die Geistwissenschaften to set the context of the analysis. On the other hand, I will use husserlian texts that establish the problem of intersubjectivity, in other words, I will be using the late writings of husserlian philosophy to show the accomplishments of this type of inquiry.

To sum up, my concern in how can these two philosophies help us to understand the tasks of a philosophy of culture, and his primary obligations, that is to give an answer to the following questions: How can we understand other cultures without losing the concept of