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Vol. XVIII, N 1, 2006

Edmund Husserl: Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester

1920/1924, edited by Henning Peucker, Husserliana XXXVII, Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004, 502 pp.
Intentionality and evidence are fundamental concepts to Husserlian
phenomenology but, what are their limits? Can we speak of the intentionality and evidence of our emotional lives, of the validity of our feelings? In
Ideas, published in 1913, Husserl sustains that evidence is a matter concerning all sorts of acts, that is, not only those impinging on the sphere of
belief, but also those touching on the realms of sentiment and will 1 . But in
Ideas I caught in the frame of a phenomenology of reason Husserl restricts himself to indicating which directions phenomenological analyses
should take concerning these parallel spheres, as relates to doxic actions
and their correlates. This limitation is far from being gratuitous, insofar as
Husserls interest in this text is aimed at the doxic or theoretic spheres as
founding strata for the axiological and practical realms. It is in his lectures
on ethics that Husserl finally concerns himself with feeling and wanting.
This is the case of the lessons on ethics and the theory of value published
in volume XXVIII of the Husserliana 2 , collecting texts of what are known as
his antebellum ethics 3 . Even thought the question on the intentionality of
feelings is boarded by the Logical investigations 4 ; it is never sufficiently developed there, because it is subordinated to the issue on the thetic character of life experiences in general. It is by virtue of an idea that is present
both in Hua XXVIII, and in the volume we are here reviewing, that the emotional life finds its place in ethics: all desire depends on a valuation
(Werten), and every valuation on a feeling (Fhlen).
Volume XXVIII of the Husserliana belongs to the first phase of the
ethics. Among the complementary texts it gathers are manuscripts of the
Husserl, Edmund, Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, translated by Jose Gaos, Madrid: FCE, 1993, p. 334.
2 Husserl, Edmund, Vorlesungen ber Ethik und Wertlehre 1908-14, edited by Ullrich
Melle, Husserliana XXVIII, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988 (from here,
Hua XXVIII).
3 Melle, Ullrich, The Development of Husserls Ethics, in: tudes phnomnologiques, VII (1991), p. 115.
4 Cf. Husserl, Edmund, Logical investigations, translation by Manuel Garcia Morente
and Jose Gaos, Barcelona: Altaya, 1995, tome II, Fifth investigation, 15, pp. 505511 (from here, IL); Logische Untersuchungen, edited by E. Strker, Gesammelte
Schriften 3, Hamburg: Meiner, 1992, tome II, V. ber intentionaler Erlebnisse und
ihre Inhalte, 15, pp. 401-410 (from here, LU).
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lessons on ethics of1897 and 1902. But the main text of this volume is
made up by the lectures given in Gottingen between 1908 and 194, that is,
around the time in which transcendental phenomenology of these lectures
is to scientifically ground a formal ethics that refutes ethical skepticism and
relativism. This founding consisted in displaying the essential correlation
between the objectivity of values and the acts of feeling and wanting. Thus,
Husserl presents a formal axiology and practices in the frame of a static
philosophy while chasing the thread of the analogy between logics and ethics. Whereas the first should be concerned with the laws of values seen as
the objective expressions of the laws of motivation, the second has the categorical imperative and rectitude of will (die Willensrichtigkeit) as its key concepts.
The late or postwar ethics are frequently presented as being under
the influence of Fichte, whose ideal of humanity is a theme of Husserls
lectures between 1917 and 1918. The scarce extant bibliography available
for this period of Husserlian ethics 5 tends to leap 6 towards the articles
written between1922 and1924 for the Japanese journal Kaizo 7 , the central
theme of which were renovation (Erneuerung) and the ethical life as elemental possibilities for a genuinely human life. The publication of volume
XXXVII of the Husserliana is thus essential for whoever wishes to trace a
panorama of Husserls ethics. It comprises the 1920 lectures he repeated in

It must be noted that, despite specialists generally agreeing in dividing Husserlian

ethics into two parts, Peucker in his introduction to the present volume speaks of
a new development in ethics occurring in the 30s. This refers to the group of ethicalmetaphysical manuscripts E III 1-11.In his book Praxis und Theoria. Husserls transzendentalphnomenologische Rekonstruktion des Lebens (Freiburg/Munich: Alber,
1997, pp. 125-130), Hans Reiner Sepp broadly speaks of two phases to his ethics.
But in the article Mundo de la vida y tica en Husserl (in: San Martn, Javier (ed.),
Sobre el concepto de mundo de la vida. Actas de la II Semana espaola de fenomenologa, Madrid: UNED, 1993, pp. 76-77), he refers to this very group of manuscripts
as a third phase in Husserlian ethics, marked by numerous developments that are
not systematically unified. In his own words: Husserl barely speaks of ethics anymore, referring only to the ethical and the conditions of an ethical (individual or
community) life, while also and frequently incurring an ethical-religious spin, with a
metaphysical perspective. This is a sign that the ethical question had not in the least
lost relevance to the late Husserl: rather, it had finally found its place in a teleological-metaphysic frame that encompasses it.
6 An exception to this, written in Spanish, is the article by Javier San Martin, tica,
antropologa y filosofa de la historia. Las Lecciones de Husserl de Introduccin a la
tica del Semestre de verano de 1920, in: Isegora, 5 (1992), pp. 43-77.
7 Published in: Husserl, Edmund, Aufstze und Vortrge (1922-1937), edited by
Thomas
Nenon
and
Hans
Reiner
Sepp,
Husserliana
XXVII,
Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988; Renovacin del hombre
y de la cultura, translation b Agustin Serrano de Haro and with an introduction by
Guillermo Hoyos, Barcelona: Anthropos, 2002.
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Freiburg in 1924. Without severing ties to his pre-war ethics, these lectures
show how the static grounding of validity leads to the genetic founding of
the field of ethics, and how, as a consequence of this, the concepts of person and history take on an importance they did not yet have at the time of
the Gottingen lectures.
The course corresponds to manuscript F I 28 and has ten chapters,
as well as a series of complementary texts, among which a digression on the
distinction between nature and spirit and their corresponding sciencesis
worthy of notice 8 .The first chapter, dedicated to the determination of ethics,
is clearly distinguished from the ones following it by its conceptual and
systematic content. From the second to the ninth chapter, Husserl will assume a historic-critical strategy in pursuing the history of ethics and drawing the necessary materials for a founding of philosophical ethics from it.
The procedure will be rather like the zigzag which will be finally revisited in,
say, the Crisis. The lectures conclude with a chapter proposing an ethics of
the best possible life that is closely related to the notions on self-renovation
presented in the articles for Kaizo.
The first chapter is a systematic determination of ethics insofar as
they make up a universal theory of rules (universale Kunstlehre). Husserl is
guided by the idea that, just as logic is conceived as being the theory of the
rules of thought and prescribes scientifically founded norms for the judgment of truth or falsehood, ethics can be conceived as the theory of the
rules of rational desire and action; with their universal nature spanning
logic itself, since scientific judgment is but a particular mode of human
activity in general (p. 4). In the measure they are universal, ethics cannot
be reduced to the establishment of the formal laws of practical consequence
and contradiction: rather, they inquire on the legitimacy and rectitude of
the ends of our will, through the norms of preference and actions, finally
asking whether every human being is subject to the demands posed by a
universal duty that, as an ultimate end, directs the whole of life. Husserl
ends his first paragraph by establishing the feasibility of a practical and
normative discipline as a point of departure: starting from what is respectively due (das Gesollte) in each case, and following what is typical to the
practical situations possible, affords us with practical prescriptions on how
to lead our lives in accordance to them, drawing us as close as possible to
the notion of a good ethical life and to how we may enact its possibility (p.
We shall not concern ourselves with the complementary texts, but will remit to
them when it is pertinent. On the sense and purpose of the digression, cf. San Martn, J., tica, antropologa y filosofa de la historia. Las Lecciones de Husserl de
Introduccin a la tica del Semestre de verano de 1920.

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7). The second paragraph completes this characterization of ethics by introducing three ideas, namely: a) that ethical judgments verse on the person
as the substrate for the habitualities of wanting, desiring, valuing; b) that
ethics do not coincide with moral philosophy, as this would imply that duty
the absolute demand of practical reason would be restricted to loving
ones neighbor as an ultimate end; c) that in the measure that our own
ethical judgments refer not just to individuals but also to the community,
ethics are not only individual, but also social.
In 3-5, Husserl takes some distance from Brentano by striving to
show in what sense the concept of a theory of rules (Kunstlehre) is adequate
for the establishment of ethics. This discussion has the Prolegomena of the
LI at its backdrop. It may surprise us to find that, having dissociated pure
logic from logic as a theory of rules in the Prolegomena, Hisserls serves
himself of the latter to determine the nature of ethics. However, two senses
of the concept of a theory of rules are at stake here, and they can already be
gleaned in the Prolegomena 9 . In one of these, a theory of rules is a system of
practical prescriptions, but to the extent that every practical enunciation
can be theoretically oriented, we may render praxis as a theoretic theme.
When the practical approach stops being the determining one and the theoretic approach comes to the fore, theories of rules may develop into scientific disciplines. Husserl reserves the term Technologie for this second sense
of the term. Thus, a scientific notion of ethics is maintained by suppressing
the error of tradition incurred both by ethics and logic by considering
them as disciplines determined by practical interest, and founded in psychology on the basis of empirical enunciations. As in the Prolegomena before, Husserl makes a quick sketch of the refutation of logical psychologism
to underscore that this critique is also valid for ethical psychologism so that
analogously to the case of doxic actions it can be said that a welldirected act of will and its good intent (for example, the truth of will) is not
good because I, this contingent man, have causally come into being in this
psychophysic nexus of nature, it is good because of what resides in it in
terms of its ideal content (p. 31). Even if they were determined by a practical interest, these disciplines require a prior theoretic foundation, provided by pure logic in one case and by pure ethics in the other, insofar as
they involve a fundamental a priori discipline of reason in valuing and
wanting generally (p. 32).
9 Every artform [Kunstlehre] evidently implies a normative discipline, but not a practical oneConversely, every normative discipline in which the fundamental valuation
is turned into the focus of the corresponding end develops into an art (LI, tome I,
15, p. 64; LU, tome I, Gesammelte Schriften 2, p. 59).

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From chapter two, the previous refutation will be transferred to the

history of ethics. Husserl detects a struggle in ethics to become a strict science, and claims its birth as such in the opposition posed by Socrates to
the skepticism of the sophists. Husserl finds in Socrates, and in the idea of
Platonic knowledge, an effort towards the intuitive fulfillment of the essence
of the ethical values, albeit without ethics reaching the form of a systematic
science ( 7). This will be menaced by ancient hedonism, which, in failing to
distinguish between de facto and de iuris, blurs the normal our practical
inclination towards pleasure with the normative, taking the sense of good
and the duty of the facts of experience as such ( 8). This keeps it from seeing that through ethical concepts we deal with normative ideas remitting to
possible subjects which judge, value and want, implying a noetic the concepts of which convey a just or unjust wanting and acting from an ethical
stance (p. 44). The motives present in ancient hedonism will reappear in the
history of modern ethics, which Husserl characterizes on the basis of the
opposition between empiricism and ethical rationalism, 9 of which will
bring the second chapter to a close.
The third lecture thus retakes the hedonistic motives found in the
philosophy of Hobbes, pointing out their repercussion in egotistic and altruistic utilitarianism. This presentation has the purpose of showing how ethics and Hobbes theory of the State have the value of a theoretical experiment. If we strip it clean of its empirical attireand with it, of the onesidedness implied in the idea of an essentially egotistic man the notion of a
personal subject in general and a pure theory of the State emerges (p. 58).
Husserl refers to pure, in this case, as an idealization such as that which
operates in geometry. To this extent, he refers to it as to mathematics of
sociality, the value of which consists in being a first draft of a pure and a
priori consideration of the essence of man as an actor, communicated to his
equals from the vantage of practical a priori possibilities and in rational
forms of action and community life.
Chapter four and five concern themselves with hedonism. The first is
a criticism to hedonism insofar as it is a form of ethical skepticism, a critique which gives Husserl the chance to outline the elemental structure of
aspiration. This analysis is completed in the fifth chapter, which is dedicated to the different forms of modern hedonism. Both lessons set the
course for the theme of the spiritual being as the realm of motivation, which
will be boarded in the sixth chapter.
The analysis of aspiration is targeted at showing that, through essential necessity, every aspiration and all forms of desire, generally is en-

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dowed with a priori intentionality, invested with the notion of fulfillment of

the value. Hedonists do not distinguish between the mention of the value
and its fulfillment, and thus confuse valuation with the value, and the act
of loving with what is lovable, pleasure with what triggers it, and so forth:
they confuse subjective and objective aspects. Pleasure, Husserl clarifies,
pertains to the sentient subject (fhlendes Subjekt) and it is through that
sentiment that he becomes aware of the value as a moment of the thing. In
other words, hedonism fails to distinguish between the temporal and the
ideal. It is true that the real values, the good, are like feeling and valuing
temporal; however, in one case they involve real time, and in another, the
time of the conscience (p. 73). Ideal values such as the beauty of a work of
art are supratemporal and must be distinguished from the sentiments
evoked by being given a valuable object. Hedonism is correct in claiming
aspiration is fulfilled in a pleasure, but it is not directed at pleasure, or at
the joy that is brought on by reaching the desired end: it is directed at the
value, lest a return to the infinite should be accepted (p. 90).
Thus, one must distinguish three things things at the essence of aspiration: on the one hand is the act we consider a value (Werthalten), with
the latter being summoned in the conscience of non-reality; then there is
the value per se (whether aesthetical, theoretical, relative, personal, etc.)
and, finally, there is the estimation (Wertnehmen) performed as a conscience that feels the value is granted to it in person, quite as in perception
(Wahrnehmung) the existent is experienced in person (cf. pp. 85-86). And
just as in the case of perception the phenomenologists vantage is addressed to the object of experience, in the case of real life we must return
from the value to the valuation. In this sense, Husserl rebukes hedonisms
lack of a return to the original sources of ethical concepts, and it is precisely this that he is signaling when claiming that a philosophical ethic and
to the extent that it is at its foundation a scientific theory of value, demands an a priori phenomenology of conscience that correlates to it, to
knowledge and in this case, the conscience that feels, desires, wants in the
totality of its multiple variations, wit these being always outlined a priori (p.
77). So it is that, for Husserl, ethics demand a transcendental theory of
valorative reason and practical reason (p. 91).
The different forms of hedonism share this lack of a foundation.
Husserl tackles the ethical subjectivism of Stirners egotistic hedonism
(Lamettrie, Helvetius, Betham) and the altruistic hedonism of Hartley and
John Stuart Mill. Besides the confusion between the value and the feeling of

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joy that perceives it 10 , Husserl reproaches Stirners identification of the two

senses of the subjectivity of feeling, since sentiments subjectivity insofar
as it is my experience in no way implies that it is merely subjetive, as
opposed to objetively valid. This erroneous identification keeps us from
admitting that emotional experiences also imply principles of legitimacy and
illegitimacy, which in turn feeds the prejudice that feeling is, unto itself,
something irrational (p. 92). And if we accept such principles, then we
cannot grasp them in a psychological, associative manner, as do hedonism
or altruistic utilitarianism, which accounts for the mechanic and psychological emergence of disinterested benevolence through egotistic motivation.
Chapter six charges against this naturalistic and one-sided perspective
on spiritual life. Husserl here denounces the mechanisms of sensualist and
naturalist psychology that keep us from seeing that spirituality hails to a
personal subject which, in correlation to the development of the surrounding
world and in the unity of constant development, becomes the self insofar as
individual personality of a superior kind (p. 105). Recalling Dilthey, Husserl
opposes the explanation provided by the natural sciences to the comprehension of spiritual genesis, which consists in reconducting the spiritual to
its source by displaying the motivational connections that determine it. The
question for our motivations leads to the distinction between active and passive or affective spirituality 11 . The latter serves as constant backdrop to the
psychic, which proceeds through association and without the activity of the
self. This primordial passivity feeds off the sphere of rational actions
including those of the emotional life in which the self is situated. Such acts
and the senses they evoke are then submerged in a secondary passivity; what
is valued as means become sediment with the sense of a means, just as the
ultimate end become sediment with the sense of a value unto itself. The action and the sense alike can be reactivated and questioned on their aesthetic,
logical or ethical legitimacy. What interests Husserl is that the establishment
of questions for the origins of our actions is de facto and not de iuris, that all
ethical questions are of this same nature. We can thus delineate the essence
of the correct valuation and the true value, and the decision of the will or of
the true practical good. This is how Husserl insists in that the value acts of
sentiment and the acts of the will both count with essential laws of legitimacy
and illegitimacy that can be intellectually foundedas regards their motiva10 A distinction leading to sensible feelings as materials for the unity of axiological
apperception and their repercussions in a state of mind (Stimmung). Cf. annex III,
pp. 326-327.
11 Cf. Annex V: Motivacin racional y motivacin pasiva. Sobre la distincin entre
motivacin racional y pre-racional (1920), pp. 331-332.

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tional circumstances (p. 122). For Husserl, this opens up the field for the
investigation of axiology and ethics that psychological naturalism and the
struggle between the morality of sentiment and the morality of understanding all but lost from sight.
Husserl takes care of this particular quarrel in the seventh chapter, by
presenting it as the historical enactment of the opposition between ethicoempiric anthropology and the rationalist ethic, which arises as the necessary
Hobbesit reaction to what is moral in man. In this dispute, the morality of
sentiment seeks foundation in the ethic principles of the emotional life,
whereas the morality of understanding posits as the groundwork for the objective and unconditional validity of these principles a pure reason that will,
eventually, allude to the idea of God. Confronted by this opposition, phenomenology finds itself being constantly put between the Scilla of theologism
in which rationalism ever incurs, and the Charybdis of anthropologism and
biologism in which empiricism repeatedly falls.... (p.132). In any case, if this
dispute does make sense, it is because each of the parts assumes that there
is a truth and a valid correction for every rational being (p.149).
Cudworth (1617-1688), a representative of the school of Cambridge,
partakes of rationalist theologism since despite portraying an accurate parallelism between mathematical and ethical legality he fails to acknowledge
the autonomy of the idealities that these entail, and deposits them in God.
Simultaneously, he does not distinguish what is proper of an ethical law,
namely, that besides being a theoretical enunciation enclosing a truth that is
susceptible of being seen through evidence, it is a general exigency, an imperative on the acting and deciding of a subject of the will. He thus makes no
distinction between the reason which judges on duty and reason itself, so
that ethical reason is here reduced to being a theoretical reason passing
judgment on ethical matters (p. 136); and even if we were to accept this, we
should not want to succumb to intellectualism, but must rather lend some
thought to the issues and origins that underlie the corresponding judgments
for, when theoreticians refer to being and non-being, ethicists refer to what is
dutiful and what is not (das Gesolltes und Nicht-Gesolltes).
Another risk in drawing too close a parallel between the mathematic
and the ethical is the confusion of the laws that rule over things with normative laws or the laws of reason. This is Clarkes (1675-1729) case, who,
upon identifying reason with nature, concludes that a non-ethical action is
that which contradicts the nature of things. But this is contradictory, because our action cannot counteract the laws of thingness, while it can
counter normative laws as in when we judge wrongly or act viciously-.

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Hence, ethical laws do not regulate being or actions as they would a thing,
rather, they express the essential connection between, say, the normative
predicate bad and certain kinds of actions (p. 141).
In its effort to sustain the objectivity of the validity of ethical judgments, ethical rationalism fails to consider ethical truths unto themselves,
which are then taken to a judicative expression Husserl will later say that
the operation of valuative and practical reason are performed before thought
and consist in a pre-theoretical objectivation (cf. p. 185). Because of this,
ethics are not unlike logicself-referential; ethical judgments are not judgments on other judgments: the normative laws to which they hail are not, like
those of logic, laws on judicative truth, but rather, laws on emotional life and
the will (p. 153). By this dependency of theoretical objectivity and the foundation of ethical concepts in pure understanding, rationalist ethics lose sight of
the bond between the three functions of actions that are present when experienced morally (cf. 153). Because of this, Husserl will finally opt for the
morality of sentiment, recognizing groundwork for phenomenological analyses in it, as based on the interlocking of the types of actions (p. 154). Convinced that practical behaviour is, manifestly, determined by feeling,
Husserl will claim that if we were to eliminate sentiments, then all ethical
concepts, and the concepts of ends and means, good and bad, virtue and
obligation; all such particular inherent concepts would cease to make sense.
Man would no longer be an essence that aspires, wants, acts (pp. 147-148).
The exposition of the morality of sentiment is taken on through
Shaftesbury, Butler and Hutcheson. Despite Husserl reproach of Shaftesburys (1671-1713) confusion between ethic and aesthetic judgments, he
acknowledges his theory of the harmony of the affections has the merit of
pointing out the need for thinking on the constitution of moral judgment
and virtue. The survey he makes of this theory gives Husserl the chance of
introducing a concept of the moral self, as we do not only judge the ethic
character of actions, but also the person itself. It is the capacity for selfevaluation and this awareness of its aspirations to superior practical values
that distinguishes the moral self. Husserl refers to it as the causa sui of its
own morality (p. 163), but distinguishes between two different types of
morality: one comprised by the actions through which the evidence of the
determination and norms of oneself is experienced, making up the moral
self, to later pass to habituality; the other, constituted by the virtuous
moral acts occurring in the unreflective moral life (p. 164). Therefore, the
moral person is that which as a consequence of an instituting will aspires
habitually to good and lives the whole of his life in a unitary and habitual

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teleological regulation. This will be taken up by the tenth chapter, after an

exposition on the moral philosophy of Kant is performed.
Having settled the dispute between the morality of sentiment and that
of understanding in he XVIIth century, Husserl dedicates his eigth chapter
to Hume, whose general problem is that skepticism, in ethics, comes as a
result for the causal explanation denying sentiment of reason. By reducing
sentiments to sensible qualities understood as psychic facts, Hume fails to
consider motivation and the intentionality of sentiment. Before this position, Husserl sustains that all feeling states something and harbours a correct or incorrect appraisal, a valuation which bestows a convenient or inconvenient value on the object (p. 181). Besides, although Hume takes care
of the relationship between the different kinds of acts, he explains the
emergence of the relation between sentiment and the object of representation a correlate to the acts of knowledge from the vantage of an association he interprets as a psychical attraction, thus reducing it to the contingency of psychic facts. If we were to free ourselves from this empiricist bent
and consider the fiction of a pure self that feels and values, Husserl says,
certain axiological and practical laws would become evident: for example, a
subject that has the certainty that something joyful does not exist is rationally motivated to suppress his joy and it would be perverse, and irrational
to his feelings, to be glad instead of sad, just as it would be contrary for
practical reason to aspire to a means without knowing whether it refers to
some eventual end (pp. 182-183).
Like Shaftesbury, Hume confuses ethics and aesthetics, and makes of
the first an aesthetic of character and actions. Having exposed the Humean
distinction between the different types of sentiment, Husserl explains that
for Hume the realm of the ethical is that of the beautiful broadly, since he
bestows an ethical character onto disinterested feelings of pleasure. Hume
thinks that for the generation of such sentiments, the imagination is
enough. But when it comes to ethical judgments, we value the good by basing ourselves on the belief in reality, something that does not occur in aesthetic judgment, in which the belief in the existence of beauty is at never in
question. So it is that Hume fails to see that knowledge, in all of its modalities of belief, presents itself as the support for sentiment and the valuations
of the good, nor can he tell that the latter is the support for the acts of the
will. As we shall see, the connection between wanting and valuing is an
essential characteristic for Husserl and because of it, he shall object to
Kants reducing it, on account of a sentiment of respect before the moral
law, a merely anthrpological connection (p. 211).

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The survey of Kantian morality begins with a presentation of the first

seven paragraphs of the Critique of Pure Reason, after which Husserl questions the Kantian conception of pure will and opposes to it the idea of a
phenomenology of will that asks for the specific in its validity and for how it
comes to be authorized. Phenomenological ethics can thus be understood
as a logic of the will (p. 213). The only justification that can be demanded
of such a science is intuitive evidence. However, rather than taking the intuitive method already signaled by Hume, Kant posits a transcendental
deduction of the obligations from pure reason, without considering that a
subject of the will is, a priori, a subject that feels and values. Acts of the will
are stated in our valuations; hence, a self that wants is unconceivable without the motivation given by a valuation, that is, without a feeling (p. 215).
We want in terms of what we feel and value. The problem is that, for Kant,
every object is an object of nature, empirical and contingent. This identification leads him to dismiss all the formations of the cultural world the
realms of valuing, wanting and possible praxis as mere nature (p. 219).
The result of the dualism between sensibility the field of irrational facticityand a priori reason works to the exclusion of ideal objectivities as practical objects. In the face of this, and with the purpose of making the realm of
phenomenological ethics more clear, Husserl posits the concept of effective
ideal realities (idealen Wirklichkeiten) and distinguishes between Realisierung and Verwirklichung (cf. pp. 216-218) thus revisiting the idea of the
spiritualized objects that appears in Ideas II.
The critique of the Kantian exclusion of the sentiments as determinations of the will insists on two points. First, there is the distinction between
passive sensible feeling to which correction or incorrection cannot be adjudicated and the valorative actions of sentiment. The first have a transcendental function in the second: for example, they partake in the constitution of the beauty of a body insofar as it comprises a unity amongst the
multiplicity o f feelings. Secondly, and by resting on the comparison between active sentiments and perception, Husserl insists in that the former
also presuppose the ability to experience their own evidence. If Kant does
not accept the possibility of speaking in terms of validity and the fulfillment
of sentiment, it is because he shares the sensualist bias that reduces it to
being a psycho-physcical fact of human nature (p. 227). He is thus far from
seeing that this distinction between mention and fulfillment also stages an
appearance in the phenomenon of preference, and that this valid for the
three spheres of action. In theoretical preference, we address the probable
as a correlation to the belief in the possibility of being; the preference in

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sentiment portrays one of the values as the best; finally, in the case of the
will, preference submits a will that has been valued as the best, and eventually translates it into duty.
What is best in every case can then be legitimated or, on the contrary,
shown to be worse. The consequence of excluding valorative actions of sentiment from the sphere of essential motivation is the hypostasis of a pure
reason understood as a capacity exempt from any determination that may
come from practical situations. The categorical imperative only says: act
rationally! (p. 234). Towards the end of the second chapter (p. 47), Husserl
already signals that a formal ethics does not exclude, but demands, a material ethic. We cannot want concretely without taking into account the materiality of the will and of the circumstances that compel us. The demand for
expending with material contents Husserl claims, is a nonsensical one in
the spheres of will and thought alike (p. 235).
Now then, none of these critiques should stop us from underlining
Kants merit in having posited a morality of obligation based on the phenomenon of self-determination. Thus, the Kantian notion of duty leads
Husserl to that of rational self-configuration: man is distinguished by the
ability to self-configure from rational goals perceived as duties. This serves
him as a bridge to the last chapter, which starts by stating the distinction
between the axiologic and the ethic dispositions. The first is an ontological
attitude, addressing the genres and species of values. In it, persons are only
considered as goods among other goods (p. 245). A question on value, say,
on my value as a human being, is not an ethical question such as: what
should I do? or, am I a moral human being? Neither a theory of value nor a
theory of goods constitutes an ethic (ibid.).
What is proper of an ethical attitude is that, in it, we are motivated by
the certainty of the normative natures of willing and acting which, because
of this, come to lose that distinctive feature of ingenuity that is typical to
the natural attitude: contrarily, in the ethical attitude, we live in the will to
think, to value, to wanting with evidence and, in agreement with this, to
keeping original convictions and acquisitions stemming from authentic reason in sight (p. 248). This will is not enough, however. The scientist, for
example, in his will to universal truth, adheres to a certain normativity, but
does not inquire for the norm itself, nor does he ask himself if his will is
good. Despite this, the example of a vocational scientific life helps Husserl
demonstrate that an ethical life is that which follows a universal, normative
regulation. This is not just a quantitative, but a qualitative, matter. The
artist does not aspire just to the beautiful: he strives for the highest beauty

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he can reach. Recalling the formal practice of Hua XXVIII 12 , Husserl sustains that: In every sphere, the best is the enemy of the good and absorbs
all lesser goods into itself (p. 251).
Husserl broadens this will to the best that he finds in the vocational
scientist or artist to man in general. He thus posits the universal calling to
be a fulfilled, authentic and true man. To achieve this, I must decide to live
the whole of my life in such a way that it is my best possible life: with best
possible standing for the best that I can do. This is the dutiful, the absolutely dutiful life, for me (p. 252). It is worth noting that, in the measure in
which what is due, that is, the truth of the will, is never valid unto itself,
my best will be determined by the past and present horizons delineating
my future life. It will not concern the best possible life of any person, but
that of a particular individual and his particular history. It is my best and
my due, as an individual (p. 253). Husserl posits an individual categorical
imperative: Do, from this point onwards and without hesitating, your very
best, your very best forever, and pursue it in the knowledge of what is just
according to norm, and want it through the conscious will of it (ibid.).The
best, which depends on our valuations, is not thus chosen or performed
ingenuously; it is the result of an ethical life which makes the categorical
imperative a habitual guide 13 .
We shall finish with two observations. Firstly, we shall reinforce the
need for an ethic materiality since all wanting, including that which relates
to the categorical imperative, is possible only on account of its particular
motivation and through the values which, insofar as they are also motives,
are bestowed onto particular situations. Next, Husserl points out that the
moral personality is an idea we fringe to a higher or lesser degree (p. 246),
and which we may thus understand as a regulative notion. Thus, the static
groundwork for the validity of axiological and practical laws that worried
Husserl during the pre-war epoch becomes, in Hua XXXVII, a genetic foundation for ethics understood not only in terms of the history of ethics, but
also as the constitution or the genesis of the moral person, from the teleological perspective that is typical of the late Husserl.
Mariana Chu
Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru

(Translated from Spanish by Monica Belevan)

12
13

Cf. Hua XXVIII, p. 136.

Cf. Annex XII, pp. 339-342.

ARET Revista de Filosofa, vol. XVIII, N 1, 2006 / ISSN 1016-913X