Husserl's Intercultural Phenomenology: Resituating Europe, Reason, and the Lifeworld

Husserl’s critics argue that his analysis of Europe, rationality, and the lifeworld in his groundbreaking 1936 work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is ultimately Eurocentric. Others defend Husserl’s articulation of the cosmopolitan universalist aspirations of philosophy and a life form of individual autonomy and free rational inquiry in the context of growing irrationalism and fascism. Both perspectives have their validity: Husserl’s genealogy addressed a unique Occidental history and ideal of rationality, identified with the idea of “Europe” in contrast to specific national identities, and his analysis retained Eurocentric elements that restricted its universalist cosmopolitan aspirations. The present contribution outlines an alternative approach by differentiating Eurocentric, cosmopolitan, and intercultural moments in Husserl’s works in a liberalizing or pluralizing immanent critique that interculturally modifies Husserl’s phenomenology of rationality, history, and the lifeworld. By drawing on modern Chinese philosophy, his contemporaries such as Georg Misch, and Husserl’s phenomenology, I sketch how Husserl’s philosophy already indicates a more pluralistic and critical intercultural understanding of the lifeworld and reason beyond the dialectic of pseudo-universalism and ethnocentric particularism that continues to confront contemporary existence.