Tom 35 (2023): Zeszyt 1 (May 2023)

In this paper, I discuss the guidelines of a phenomenology of the social world in the wake of Alfred Schutz and José Ortega y Gasset. While the latter was not, for a long time, acknowledge as a phenomenologist, the former is a well-known critique of Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity and of the possibility of grounding a community of transcendental Egos. Both, however, remained faithful to some basic phenomenological tenets, namely, that individual subjectivity has a relational character, the circumstances in which men live are a part of their life, and life is characterized by its openness to the world. On this basis, they both carried out a phenomenological description of social existence, stressing its two main assumptions: 1) there are things that must be taken for granted; 2) habitualities, typical constructions, and systems of relevance are the primary ways of dealing with social events and other fellow citizens. In different ways, they both showed that the traditional objections opposed to phenomenology regarding its capacity to address mundane human existence stemmed from a misunderstanding of its basic tenets and intentions.

According to Gerda Walther, a community arises only if positive feelings, which she calls inner unification, eliminate hostilities among people. There are two objections to this claim, which one can develop from Aron Gurwitsch’s critical examination of Walther’s account. The present paper aims to respond to those objections and, through this, to clarify her account of community. To this end, the author deals with Walther’s brief remark on a “pathological” form of community and her accounts of inner unification. Considering those two factors, the author further shows that Walther’s idea is more plausible than it initially may appear. Contrary to what Gurwitsch seems to think, her account of communities allows for conflict and even certain types of hostility within a community.

In this article, I present the phenomenological tradition as a new grounding for human rights as universal rights. The hypothesis defended is to conciliate Husserl’s phenomenological method, and Reinach’s a priori law in order to offer a new grounding to human rights. Combining Husserl and Reinach’s ideas, I propose to expand the comprehension of a priori. It would be present as eidos of each object, and I name it as material a priori; it also be present in the eidetic relations and I name it as formal a priori. Yet the object would have an essence, a necessary content, a material a priori, and necessary states of affairs, necessary relations and connections, a formal a priori. Reinach, in The A priori Foundations of the Civil Law, describes eidetic relations, such as the relation between promise, claim, and obligation. I propose three eidetic universalities to ground law; these are what I will call human rights. I also face a few difficulties presented by DuBois and De Vecchi derived from the amoral approach of a priori laws. Then, I highlight the difference between this proposition and Albert’s. Finally, I defend the proposition that a priori laws are beyond natural and positive laws.

This article focuses on possible convergences between phenomenology and anthropology and underlines their contributions to the analysis of a specific topic. In its reconstructive dimension it departs from Edmund Husserl’s positions in the letter he addressed to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in 1935, in particular on the relationship between humanity and the surrounding word (Umwelt) and on the opposition between historical societies and primitive ahistorical societies. After having noted some critical points emerging from Husserl’s considerations, this text retraces some of its repercussions on the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida, whose diverging interpretations open up different ways of examining the relationship between the respective phenomenological and anthropological perspectives. Finally, with the aim of rethinking the contributions of these two fields to address the problem of the co-participation and the differentiations between the archaic and the current in descripted social structures by Lévy-Bruhl, this text turns to the specific temporality of totemic presentifications, which should become phenomenologically more detailed.

According to Husserl, the mathematization of the lifeworld involves reducing it, as object of knowledge, to what is measurable, as well as excluding other forms of knowledge of it. This has important implications in relation to the modern conception of rationality, and, significantly, of practical rationality. More precisely, it issues in an impoverishment of the notion of reason. This article examines the idea that the process of commodification associated with the consolidation and expansion of capitalism has motivated another aspect of the mathematization of nature to which Husserl alludes: the mathematization of value. Born from capitalist economy and from practical attitudes, this mathematization of value is a tendency to reduce all value to use value. In such context, this article offers a phenomenological reflection on the crisis of modern rationality, especially in relation to the difficulty to undertake collective actions that follow logics that are different from that of the accumulation of capital, based on the examination of this other aspect of the mathematization of the lifeworld.