Abstracts

Kaizō, the Japanese magazine in which Edmund Husserl’s three essays appeared in the early 1920s, was an example of a media form known as sōgō zasshi or “comprehensive magazine” that flourished in Japan in the interwar period (1919-1937). These magazines, aimed at the educated, urban readership that emerged in the Taishō period (1912-1926) introduced current events and intellectual trends that challenged the status quo. Kaizō was launched in 1919 by Yamamoto Sanehiko, an entrepreneur who contributed to the intellectual life of modern Japan in a variety of crucial ways. This presentation will introduce Yamamoto and Kaizō and will explore how Kaizō, whose very name demonstrates a commitment to revolution and change and which regularly published the work of Western writers, was a platform particularly well suited for Husserl’s three articles.

One of Husserl’s aims in the Kaizo articles was to outline his ethics and social philosophy to Japanese readers and to invite them to participate in his project. Given the textual evidence available to us today, however, it is difficult to say that Husserl succeeded in this endeavor. Despite their privileged access to the Articles, Husserl’s Japanese students did not refer to them, at least not explicitly. Why, then, did Husserl fail to achieve his attempts? In this talk, we will reconstruct some reasons for the failure of Husserl’s Kaizo articles, focusing particularly on the reception of phenomenology and other contemporary Western philosophy in Japan in the early 20th century. The most important of these reasons is that presumed readers of Husserl may have seen some of his basic ideas as rehashes of Rudolf Eucken’s views, which had been quite popular and well-known in Japan at the time.

Hajime Tanabe, who later became a prominent philosopher of the Kyoto School in Japan, studied under Husserl while Husserl was writing his “Kaizo” articles (1922-23). Allegedly, it was Tanabe who mediated Husserl’s contribution to “Kaizo.” While Husserl discusses the relationship between the individual and the community in his “Kaizo” articles, Tanabe also delves into the same topic in his “Logic of Species,” using different concepts and methodologies. Despite these differences, there are interesting intersections between their ideas. Both authors believe that the independence of the individual and its dependence on the community cannot be simply opposed to each other; dependence is mediated by independence, and independence is mediated by dependence. Emphasizing the role of the community does not weaken individual independence, nor does respecting individual independence necessitate neglecting dependence on the community. Rather, the two are mutually mediated and reinforcing, which is precisely what Husserl attempts to show. Tanabe has a similar perspective, but he seeks to logically structure and describe it under the name of “Logic of Species.” Starting from a state in which everything is embedded in what Tanabe calls “species,” the “genus” and the “individual” stand out in opposition to each other. Tanabe sees this as a higher realization of community. 

We can find an “ethics of knowing” in Husserl’s Kaizo articles. According to its basic tenets, we must question our beliefs or knowledge (in the wide meaning of theoretical, aesthetic, and practical beliefs) and test their correctness, as an ethical life is a life that depends on the renewal of beliefs. In contemporary ethics, which focuses on the rightness or wrongness of actions, various beliefs as inner consciousness are regarded to be insignificant. However, in this presentation I will show that Husserl's “ethics of knowing” is not only valid but also opens up new directions. First, Iris Murdoch criticizes 20th-century Anglo-American moral philosophy for its emphasis on the level of action rather than belief (which she calls vision). She is heavily influenced by Sartre’s (a Husserlian) phenomenology and argues for the importance of changing the way we view the world and others. Second, the outstanding scientists involved in Minamata disease in Japan were required to change their beliefs. Masazumi Harada (medical scientist) and Jun Ui (chemist) were able to contribute to the solution for Minamata disease by learning from the visions of their patients and renewing their own knowledge.

Central topics in Husserl’s Kaizo articles are questions concerning communal renewal and reform. To assess what Husserl has to say on these topics, it is crucial to get clear on what exactly he means by community in this context (since he operates with a variety of different concepts). In my talk, I will take my point of departure in two central passages from “Erneuerung als individualethisches Problem” and “Erneuerung und Wissenschaft) where Husserl speaks of the community as a many-headed subjectivity, and introduces the notions of a “personality of higher order” and even speaks of the self-awareness possessed by a “communal subjectivity”. My main aim will be to clarify these notions. Can they be justified, and how should one understand Husserl’s claim that the members or “limbs” of such communal subjectivities are functionally intertwined through social acts?

Phenomenology in Husserl's sense is "radical self-reflection" (radikale Selbstbesinnung) directed toward the highlighting of essential structures. As such, phenomenology is a volitional action, emanating from a person and thus bound to an individual consciousness, which is in a constant process of justifying its actions. Husserl clearly takes his cue from Socrates and his idea of an "ethical reform of life," whereby the "truly satisfying life is interpreted as a life of pure reason" (Hua VII, p. 9). Husserl's conception of the human being, which he presents to his Japanese readers in the Kaizo Articles (1923-24), is essentially shaped by the idea that the individual human being must overcome and exert himself to become a "new person”. Radical self-reflection, in Husserl's view, takes place only in the struggle against the "dark" forces of the affective underground. Therefore, self-reflection, and with it the fundamental phenomenological method in the form of reduction and epoché, has its source in a personal will and decision that must be renewed again and again. In the Kaizo Articles, Husserl distinguishes between individual-ethical and social-ethical questions (especially in the 3rd article). The individual-ethical perspective is virulent in all the Kaizo articles, which is especially palpable in the inflation of the use of word combinations beginning with "self," such as self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung), self-chastisement (Selbstzucht), self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung), etc. In his reflections on social-ethics, Husserl transfers the willful striving and self-overcoming of the individual, directed toward positive values, to the will of the community. - In my presentation I would like to elaborate on the following questions: 1. How is the transition from the ego-centered individual will to the community will to be thought? 2. What role does the radical self-reflection of the individual play in the formation of an ethically ideal community? 3. How can it be  explained that Husserl in the Kaizo articles deals extensively with the method of the essence research (Wesensforschung), but that reduction and epoché as methodological foundations of phenomenological self-reflection do not play a role, or at least are not mentioned by Husserl?

What does social philosophy mean and how can Husserlian phenomenology, rather than Heideggerian philosophy, be the way to reach what we normally define as social ethics? This paper aims to answer these two fundamental questions by establishing a dialogue between Husserl and Heidegger. The correspondence between Löwith and Heidegger of Nov. 22, 1922, in which the social analysis of "Erneuerung [Renewal] " offered by Husserl in the Kaizo-article is defined by Heidegger as a “disaster”, will provide in this paper the following points of discussion: first 1) the meaning of renewal according to the Husserlian analysis of ethics. This, far from being a fantasy or a wild dream as Heidegger defines it, represents for Husserl the elevation of humanity in an ethical sense, a point that Heidegger will never reach in his social philosophy. For Heidegger, all that pertains to ethics remains tied to a normative framework and it is unable to give humanity any kind of elevation. However, it is only this kind of elevation elaborated by Husserl that can enable human beings to achieve morality, and not as Heidegger claims the truth of being; the point 2) this conference intends to focus on.  While in fact for Heidegger morality does not exist, for Husserl the dividing line between what a person should or should not do remains anchored in the reflection and in the rational thought: the faculty of reason renders human beings into ethical persons. This Husserlian point of analysis besides being much more concrete and applicable to social and legal contexts sets the philosophical reflection toward a certain kind of question: how is it possible to achieve this kind of rational thinking? The third part of this contribution 3) will be focused on this question: in particular, it will be shown how by following Brentano's line and reworking the Kantian categorical imperative the human being is invited to do “the best that is attainable”

To the Japanese readers of the journal Kaizo, Husserl addressed his analysis of the need for a renewal of European rationality. Japan, which had opened up to the West and become a “fresh green branch” of European culture, needed to become aware of the crisis of which World War I was but a symptom. According to Husserl, only by becoming aware of the reasons why the ideal of the Enlightenment had not yet been able to be realized and was no longer taking root in European minds and hearts, would it be possible to reignite it on a universal scale. Husserl's implicit message to Japanese readers was that adopting European technology necessitates committing oneself to the renewal of the Enlightenment, i.e., the philosophical idea of practical reason based on universal science. Otherwise, Japan would have suffered from the same radical crisis manifested in the specialization of disciplines, the loss of contact with scientific insights and overall vision due to technification, and thus the inability to govern its development, which was now at the mercy of individual profit, nationalisms, and belligerent imperialisms.

In my presentation, I intend first to make Husserl's message explicit by specifically analyzing the sense that Husserl gives to the invoked philosophical renewal of culture. What are the conditions of possibility of such a critical stance? What are the agents and structures that can prompt it, and what resources and goals are involved? Does Husserl's recourse to the idea of a universal philosophical community remove and repress the conflictual nature of the political?

Secondly, against the background of post- and decolonial critiques of Husserl's universalism, I will reassess his claim that such a critical stance is the essence of Europe. What does it mean that every people who make it their own enter a phase of Europeanization? Did the modernization of Japan really consist of an adherence to this model of universal rationality?

Finally, I will reassess Husserl's idea of one global culture by means of universal critique. Contemporary phenomenology seems to have largely given up on the idea that there is a 'cultural imperative' to make the many life-worlds into one world of rational life. Inspired by Diagne, Dussel, and Hountondji, I will question the presupposition that Husserl's universalism would be a leveling project in respect to cultural difference and suggest that we can de-link Husserl's universalistic ideal from his factual European perspective. Can we not aspire to a renewal of the ideal of a rational culture on a global scale that, aware of the limits and dark sides of European modernity, will be nevertheless able to repropose, in a critical spirit of open dialogue, even facing conflictual disagreements, its ‘trans-modern’ tenet, i.e. the goal of a more humane culture shaped by freedom as the habit of radical critique of one's beliefs, assumptions, and traditions?

My paper will illuminate and clarify Husserl's idea of ethical renewal by explicating the role that vocations and vocational life have in his mature philosophy. This entails two related tasks: (i) the task of understanding his analysis of the structures of conative intentionality and (ii) the task of understanding his conceptualisation of personal values of love. On the basis of my explications of these two operative concepts, I will look into the various developing formulations that Husserl gave to the categorical imperative, from the early Brentanian formulations (Do the best possible...!) to the later ones which I would like to call "Kierkegaardian" (Do the absolutely obliged!). 

The uninitiated reader might expect from the Kaizo Articles entirely new phenomenological analyses, shifting from concerns regarding science and cognition, even ethics, and certainly transcendental investigations, to ones of explicit cultural and socio-political relevance, regarding cultural reform and the overcoming of crisis. I do believe that the Kaizo articles are of such relevance, and they certainly have  the possibility of renewal and a possible cultural recovery from crisis as their topics. However, I also believe that it is worth pointing out that the articles mostly draw out implications and demonstrate the cultural relevance of analyses that Husserl shares in other writings. The reader is perhaps most surprisingly confronted with this when she is presented, already in the second (originally published as the third) of the articles with a lengthy account of phenomenological eidetics, and not ones specifically tailored to questions of cultural or socio-political issues, but, to a considerable extent, ones reviewing the whole idea of eidetics and their importance for science. In this paper, I make explicit what I take to be the most important fundamental phenomenological insights from which Husserl draws his idea of renewal, beginning with his insights into eidetic thought. Further, I will consider his notions of reason, intersubjectivity, and teleology, which, as I read it the essays, according to Husserl ‘evidently’ lead to his ideas on cultural and socio-political renewal. I conclude with some remarks on critique emerging from this discussion as well as on the task of a critical reading ‘in a Husserlian sense' of the essays themelves.

In his “Essays on Renewal,” Husserl presented a program that expands his basic theoretical stance into an individual ethics and social ethics. The fact that nothing is to be recognized that cannot be justified from full rational and intuitive insight thus becomes a way of life, a culture. This is characterized, in addition to self-legislation, self-responsibility, and self-regulation, by the basic attitude of renewal. The will to renewal results from a perpetual striving for a personal and communal ideal of perfection and can be seen as the direct practical equivalent of the concept of critique.

Husserl considers this form of life, rooted in the Greek culture of a Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to be genuinely European and derives from it an alleged superiority of European culture. This is expressed, among other things, in a responsibility for this ideal, which should be exemplary for all and thus be realized universally. At the same time, Husserl diagnoses in “European humanity” itself the greatest danger and precariousness of this ideal. The concrete political ideas on how to counter this European spiritual collapse caused by the First World War, however, remain weak: Husserl remains trapped in his Platonic model of a “man on a grand scale,” which ideally paints the picture of a harmonious community of united renewalists. Alternatively, Husserl fictionalizes the community of wills of mathematicians as an example of a free, non-ordered community of purpose. Not only do both seem extremely difficult to reconcile with real-political conditions; Husserl also does not consider that the determination of what is good and right might well turn out to be conflictual or at least pluralistic. Politics and ethical renewal thus remain matters for a seemingly unanimous science and philosophy, to which a humanity should subscribe. Furthermore, this implies that all political conflict can be dissolved in philosophical reflection.

The biggest problem of the „Essays on Renewal” seems to be that the broad lines of a theory are drawn but not filled with content, which is why — quite in contrast to the Socratic-Platonic dialogue — potential conflicts cannot appear at all. This clouds Husserl’s grand and thoroughly honest design of a rational renewal community and leaves us with the question of what role philosophy, in the sense of a practice of absolute justification, can and should actually play for the politics and organization of communities and humanity as a whole.