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332 12 Husserl’s “Hermeneutical Phenomenology” as a Philosophy of Culture Our historical existence [Dasein] moves within innumerable traditions. —Hua VI, 366 Introduction Scanning the multitude of texts from the vast amount of Husserl’s writings of the 1920s and ’30s—the period of his work of interest here—one cannot help but be struck by the multitude of themes with which Husserl was wrestling in these last years of his life: certainly the well-known theme of the method of the transcendental reduction, but also issues concerning the lifeworld, time-consciousness, constitution of space, teleological and theological problems, intersubjectivity and communal life, history, and still others.1 Choosing a representative amount of these texts in a fairly comprehensible selection is no easy task, as every editor of volumes of the Husserliana will certainly testify, and it is much less easy to find guiding clues among this vast amount of texts, themes, and topics. Husserl was keenly aware of this seeming “mess.” Thus it is striking that in these late texts he was clearly intent on merging these different dimensions of problems and was attempting to view them together in different ways and from different angles. It is as if Husserl each day anew shook the kaleidoscope of his phenomenology and looked through the lens again and again, only to discover new connections, ramifications, and surprisingly unanticipated combinations which he then pursued, again getting sidetracked. Yet, all of these topics of the mature Husserl have to be seen within a matrix of problems and ultimately need to be connected to get “the full 333 H U S S E R L ’ S “ H E R M E N E U T I C A L P H E N O M E N O L O G Y ” A S A P H I L O S O P H Y O F C U L T U R E picture”—a synopsis that not even Husserl himself was able to achieve. Indeed, Husserl’s ultimate failure to produce a comprehensive “system of phenomenology” was in part due to his unceasing attempts to accomplish such a grand overview. But maybe we should be grateful for this, because such a system might have “enshrined” what was to remain a working philosophy with open horizons. Moreover, it was his personal tragedy that he was never satisfied with what he had achieved and always attempted to gain new insights from new perspectives. Phenomenology itself was like the infamous perceptual object that always shows new adumbrations and whose full comprehension lies in infinity. One line of thought that emerges in these late manuscripts, and with an eye to a synoptic reading just hinted at, is something that one might term Husserl’s “hermeneutical phenomenology.” Now it is clear that after Heidegger and especially after Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics one can no longer use this notion with innocence. It is a loaded term with which we today associate concepts such as “understanding,” “fusion of horizons,” and “history of effects” and which we take to present a very well worked-out theory that Gadamer presented first in 1960 and steadily revised until the last years of his life.2 In view of this, I am not claiming that we can find anything in Husserl that would resemble such a consciously developed theory, but rather elements or pieces that one may put together in the way attempted here. Yet what one can call a hermeneutical phenomenology, or elements of it, is certainly not restricted to Gadamer. Indeed, as the previous chapter has shown, it is rather the case that something like Gadamer’s theory rests on Husserlian foundations. Hence it will not be entirely surprising that one can spell out such a “hermeneutic phenomenology” in Husserl, though, of course, in the framework of his phenomenology as a transcendental undertaking, which shares many elements with theother transcendental philosophy discussed here, namely the transcendental theory of culture of the Marburg school. Hence, the manner in which Husserl’s hermeneutic phenomenology will be presented here will be as a philosophy of culture in the manner specified in the latter half of the chapters of this volume. If the focus here is on its “hermeneutic” element—as it has already been shown over the course of this book how Husserl himself broadens his method from description to interpretation—this means that this concluding chapter will spell out, not so much the material elements of such a philosophy of culture, but rather...

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