On Husserls Biased Meditations on the Origin of
Philosophy and the Cultural Conditions of Human Life
ETH, Switzerland
Nowhere does the theory-laden character of Husserl¡¦s phenomenological intuitions become as apparent as in his later meditations on cultural philosophy. What he propounds as a special achievement of Greek-European philosophy, namely the qualification of the own tradition as one of many manifestations of something valid in itself and binding for all, can just as well be found in South Asian (Indian) ¡§doctrines of oneness¡¨ as well as in East Asian (Chinese) instances of the ¡§Golden Rule¡¨. Every person with a command of a natural language is capable of such an insight.The most appropriate model for individual cultures is not the sphere metaphor, oriented on a Platonic idea of the organism, the model that Husserl adopted for his conception of ¡§home¡¨ and ¡§foreign worlds¡¨, but rather the image of tinkering introduced by Lˆmvi-Strauss for illiterate societies and adopted by Francois Jacob to illustrate the contemporary biological concept of the organism.In the question of cultural universals, too, Husserl is oriented on classical ontological reflections rather than on recent biological models. The most interesting anthropological universals from the point of view of cultural philosophy are contingent, and not essential universals.