Ethical life and authenticity. An approach to the phenomenological ethics of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger

A dozen years ago, in my essay, ‘How medicine saved the life of ethics’[3], I argued that the debate in ethics among analytical moral philosophers, in particular the approach to the subject known as “meta-ethics,” ran into the sand in the 1960s or 1970s, and that the coincidental revival of interest in the moral problems of medicine took place just in time to redirect moral philosophy into substantive new fields of discussion. Even then, I might have done more to place this shift from definitional issues about the meaning of terms like “right” and “good” to substantive ones about the termination of artificial life support and the like within a broader historical frame, as it was already becoming clear that at a deeper level, also, the philosophical tide was turning. More recently, however, the philosophical shift from formal definitional issues to matters of substance has been unmistakable. In one respect, the change of focus in philosophical ethics between the 1950s and the 1980s had an obvious context. From early in the twentieth century, one central strand in European philosophy had been a series of critiques of Cartesian rationalism. This was launched in Germany by Edmund Husserl and Gottlob Frege, in England by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, and in the United States by William James and John Dewey. Other powerful figures involved in the critique were Lev Semenyovich Vygotsky and Mikhail Bakhtin in Russia, Ludwig Wittgenstein in Vienna, Cambridge, and Norway; while, at one stage, Martin Heidegger had a significant part to play. More recently, Richard Rorty reformulated the central themes and slogans of this critique to good effect; while, in the wings, a parallel movement in literary theory was developing under the slogan of “deconstruction.” This movement shared, at least, the conviction that all earlier quests for a comprehensive system of knowledge, based on permanent, universal systems of overarching principles, were misguided from the start, and are by now discredited. Claims to philo

Guest Editor's Introduction

Teesid: Käesolevas artiklis annan ülevaate filosoofiaprofessor Ülo Matjuse (1942–2023) fenomenoloogilisest mõtlemisest ja tegevusest. Kirjeldan Matjuse kujunemisteed fenomenoloogina, vaatlen tema kirjutatud fenomenoloogia-alaseid tekste, konverentsiettekandeid ning loenguid fenomenoloogilisest filosoofiast. Ülo Matjus oli 1970. aastatest alates üks esimesi fenomenoloogilise filosoofia uurijaid Balti riikides. Ta oli fenomenoloogilise ja olemisajaloolise mõtlemise maaletooja Eestis, selle tõlkija ning õpetaja. Matjuse fenomenoloogia-alane tegevus ei piirdunud aga ainult Eestiga. Ta oli 1970. aastatel seotud Riia fenomenoloogide ringiga ning pidas ettekandeid ka Saksamaal, kohtudes saksa filosoofi Hans-Georg Gadameriga (1900–2002). Ülo Matjuse fenomenoloogia-alased tõlked ja artiklid jäävad kestma ning õpetused jätkuvad tema õpilaste kaudu. The article introduces professor of philosophy, Ülo Matjus (1942–2023) as a phenomenological thinker. Matjus was a professor of philosophy at the University of Tartu from 1992 to 2015. His research was mainly focused on Roman Ingarden’s (1893–1970), Edmund Husserl’s (1859–1938), and Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) philosophy, but he also investigated Estonian intellectual history and was an avid bibliophile. He prepared the establishing of the Chair of Intellectual History at the University of Tartu and also studied Estonian book history and published several articles on the topic. This article focuses on Ülo Matjus as a phenomenologist. Ülo Matjus was one of the first phenomenological thinkers and researchers of phenomenological philosophy in the Baltic States in the 1970s and also a member of the Latvian Circle of Phenomenology in the same time period. Matjus started his phenomenological journey in the Soviet Union in the 1970s when Estonia was one of its parts. His earlier articles were written in Russian due to the Russian occupation and the restrictions posed by it in the Baltic States. These—for example the article ‘The Problem of the Being of “Material Things” in E. Husserl’s Phenomenology’ (1988) introduced Roman Ingarden’s and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological thinking to the Soviet intellectuals. His doctoral dissertation was also written in Russian, and was concerned with Roman Ingarden’s aesthetical views on art—its title is The Problem of Intentionality in Roman Ingarden’s Aesthetics. The thesis was supervised by professor Leonid Stolovitš (1929–2013) and defended in Riga, Latvia in 1975. Since the 1990s when Estonia restored its independence, Matjus could concentrate more on Martin Heidegger’s thinking. He had an opportunity to meet and talk with Heidegger’s student, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) in Bonn (in Bad Godesberg) on the symposium ‘On Heidegger’s Philosophical Relevance’ (1989). Matjus participated in the event as a scholarship holder for the Alexander von Humboldt’s Foundation and gave a presentation (Matjus [1989]2004b, 313). In 1993 Matjus also had a conversation with Martin Heidegger’s son Hermann Heidegger (1920–2020) about translation of Martin Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics into Estonian (Matjus 1999, 278–280). Matjus translated several phenomenological texts, for example Heideggers Introduction to Metaphysics and The Origin of the Work of Art into Estonian (1999 and 2002, respectively) and wrote afterwords to the translations. He also translated some articles and presentations by Heiddeger, for example ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ (Estonian in 1989), ‘A Question about Technique’ (1989), ‘Creative Landscape. Why we Stay in Province’ (1989), ‘Spiegel’s Conversation with Martin Heidegger’ (1992) and ‘Phenomenology and Theology’ (1994). He also translated Edmund Husserl’s The Paris Lectures (1993), to which he wrote an introduction entitled ‘Edmund Husserl on the Paths of Descartes’. Matjus taught several courses on phenomenology at the University of Tartu since the 1990s and attended conferences both in Estonia as well as in Latvia and Germany. For example, in 1995/1996–2001/2002 he gave a lecture course “The Basics of Aesthetics” (later “Aesthetics” and “Aesthetics II”) at the University of Tartu, which introduced traditional European philosophical aesthetics and Heidegger’s non-metaphysical aesthetics from The Origin of the Work of Art. In addition, Matjus gave lecture courses entitled ‘Development of Phenomenology and its Basic Problems’ in 1997/1998 and 1999/2000 and ‘Phenomenology from the Estonian Perspective’ (2012/2013, 2013/2014 and 2015/2016). Matjus also gave presentations on phenomenological philosophy, for example, ‘On the Interdisciplinary Origin of Phenomenology’ (2014) and ‘On the Benefits and Harms of Intentionality’ (2010) at the Annual Conferences of Estonian Philosophy. Some of his students have also studied phenomenology—Margit Sutrop (b. 1963), Anne Kokkov (1960–2017) and Juhan Hellerma (b. 1986) wrote their MA theses about phenomenology. Matjus also applied a phenomenological and open-minded attitude (i.e. an attitude without prejudice) in his life. As a professor and phenomenologist, he warned his students what to beware of, and toward which one must hold on to, which is part of phenomenological attitude, but let them stay themselves at the same time. He had respect for his students. He was very supportive and at the same time taught them that you have to find your own way. His teachings now live on through his students.

This paper stages readings of several fictional and non-fictional explorations of the relation of man and animal, of limits, obligations, and sympathy, as well as larger ecological questions around creatureliness and planetarity. I argue for a reassessment, via Agamben's by now familiar gloss on Heidegger's discussion of the animal, of an ineradicable creatureliness internal to the human, and then show what coming to terms with this means more broadly in ethical life. Finally, I insist on the role of fiction in the training of the imagination, a priming for the sort of ethical experience essential to good or right life.

Reviewed by: The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology by Matthew Levering Peter Cajka Matthew Levering, The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021), viii + 360 pages. Matthew Levering wants to know why conscience, important before the Second Vatican Council, became even more dominant in Catholic moral theology in the late twentieth century. His book seeks to understand, as he frames it, “why, in Catholicism, conscience so easily and stubbornly takes over the whole terrain” (11). Levering bats away confession as an answer to this smart question, observing how the sacrament has declined. He then quickly dismisses the debate over Humanae vitae as ground zero. The battle over contraception is often seen as a decisive moment in a supposed twentieth-century pivot from law to conscience. Instead, Levering provides a more creative and interesting story. Conscience sky-rocketed to a place of prominence in the late twentieth century on the wings of the existentialist surge in Continental and Catholic thought after important intellectual foundations laid by Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers in the 1940s inspired Karl Rahner, Joseph Fuchs, and Bernard Häring to infuse Catholic moral theology with existentialism in the 1960s and after. These important intellectuals began a turn towards conscience well before the 1960s. Then they inspired a generation of moral theologians to amplify conscience in Catholic tradition. Conscience remains important today. Levering’s book parallels the pathbreaking insights found in historian Edward Baring’s recent work, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the [End Page 87] Making of Continental Philosophy, a book that shows how Catholics were crucial in spreading existentialism and phenomenology across Europe in the twentieth century, making it truly “continental.”1 The approach of infusing conscience with existential thought has been picked up and pursued most prominently in recent years by Jesuit James Keenan of Boston College. Levering’s intervention is historical and, as I explore below, also profoundly theological. Rahner, Fuchs, Häring, and Keenan are just four of the twenty-six figures that Levering profiles in his impressive book. Levering has assembled a cast of characters that includes allies with whom he agrees and detractors held up as problematic. Here is where Levering’s theological intervention begins to emerge. Those he counts as fellow travelers acknowledge the importance of conscience but do not make it the center of Catholic thought; the interlocutors he takes issue with place too much hope in conscience. Levering says the writers in this latter group place conscience “at the helm” of Catholic life (192). He disagrees with this inflation, and his book seeks to subordinate conscience to other concepts while still allowing it to maintain an important role in Catholic ethics. Levering desires a much more diverse set of foundations for moral theology. “The Catholic moral life,” Levering writes, “consists in a Christ-centered ethics of the inaugurated Kingdom of God, in which the spirit leads us in charity while also forming us in humility and prudence, while also enlightening our perception of the natural law” (13). In this system, Levering adds, “conscience will continue to have a significant role, but now with the virtue of prudence” (16). He asks the twenty-six figures to serve as tour guides through four chapters, each of which constitutes discrete realms of analysis: (1) conscience and the Bible; (2) conscience and the moral manuals; (3) conscience and the Thomists; and (4) conscience and German thought. Levering lifts up thinkers like Benoît-Henri Merkelbach, Michel Labourdette, and Joseph Ratzinger, who, according to his analysis, bring conscience under the influence of other components of moral life, particularly the value of prudence. That is one side of his ledger. On the other side, Levering writes about the aforementioned existentialists but also explores the work of Biblical scholars like Philippe Delhaye, manualists like Austin Fagothey, S.J., and Thomists like Eric D’Arcy. He displays the work of these scholars as examples of Catholic thinkers who attributed too much power to conscience. Each of these writers assigns subjectivity a capacity to shape perceptions of reality. Each places serious checks on the power of law to coerce conscience. [End Page 88] Levering says...

This paper critically examines the philosophical significance of human vulnerability and the existential risks posed by its erasure in the context of transhumanist futures. Drawing on phenomenological thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas, alongside African philosophical frameworks rooted in Ubuntu ethics, the study argues that fragility is not merely a limitation to be overcome but a fundamental condition of human meaning, creativity, and ethical life. Phenomenological insights emphasise embodiment, finitude, and ethical responsibility as intrinsic to lived experience, while Ubuntu underscores the relational and communal dimensions of vulnerability. Together, these traditions affirm that human flourishing emerges through, rather than in spite of, fragility. The paper interrogates the core assumptions of transhumanism, particularly the pursuit of technological mastery over disease, ageing, and death. It critiques the reduction of human value to optimisation and the potential consequences of disembodied enhancement, including existential detachment, relational alienation, and moral erosion. Furthermore, it raises concerns about the socio-ethical implications of enhancement technologies in postcolonial contexts, where structural inequalities may lead to new forms of exclusion and ontological injustice. By integrating African and Western philosophical perspectives, the paper contends that any future-oriented technological vision must be ethically accountable to the conditions that sustain empathy, solidarity, and shared humanity. Rather than aiming to eliminate vulnerability, a more humane trajectory would seek to honour and support it, ensuring that technological advancement deepens—rather than diminishes—the meaning of human life. In this way, the paper contributes

The Ethical Reader: K. E. Løgstrup and the Ethical Turn in Literary Theory:Literary studies have on an international level witnessed a turn to ethics in the past fifteen years, but in Denmark the ethical turn in literary theory was anticipated in the 1960s by K. E. Løgstrup, theologian and philosopher. Løgstrup worked in the tradition of phenomenology (Martin Heidegger and Hans Lipps) and explored the fundamental structures of everyday life. His basic claim was that interhuman phenomena such as trust and compassion are of an inherent and spontaneous ethical nature. Løgstrup regarded literature as a reservoir of highly elaborated case studies of human and ethical life. According to him literature could capture human experience in a concrete manner that was not possible for the conceptual systems of philosophy.In this article Gunder Hansen summarizes Løgstrup’s position and compares it to some of the recent American studies in ethics and literary theory by James Phelan, Robert Pippin and Dorothy Hale. And he finds a great amount of compatibility between Løgstrup and the recent ethical turn.Løgstrup furthermore developed his own theory of the reader’s emotional and existential response to the moral education presented in literature. He finds that the emotional involvement of the reader does not have an illusionary or »parasitic« nature. On the contrary, in reading we demonstrate the ethical response that would be the natural reaction to certain events in real life. However in real life we often fail to react as we should due to selfishness and pragmatic constraints. The reader’s response is, however not only spontaneous but also contains a process of reflection and general evaluation due to the exemplary artistic presentation of events in the fictional world.At the end of the article Gunder Hansen distinguishes between two paradigms in the ethical turn, one of existentialism and one of »political correctness«. He regards the latter as problematic as it posits the reader so situated in gender, culture, minority etc. that he cannot experience self-transgression in literature but only confirmation or insult according to his norms and values.

This paper describes the phenomenological ethics implicit in Heidegger’s later work. It is argued that these phenomenological ethics take the form of a perfectionist ethics in which one consciously resists the temptation to nihilistically enframe other entities as Bestand . Despite Heidegger’s reputation as an inferior animal philosopher, it is then argued that we can employ this ethics to improve our relationship with non-human animals. Specifically, our use of them in the agricultural setting is examined to determine whether or not our current practices are ethical according to Heidegger’s normative model. Ultimately it is concluded that, more often than not, animals are harmed both ontically and ontologically by our modern farming practices. We are called on instead to try to dwell meditatively with other entities, to be-with them in such a way that respects them as inexhaustibly meaningful instantiations of being as such. This requires changes to the way in which we satisfy our needs as consumers.

In his Ethics, Aristotle joins sophrosúne and phrónesis as synonyms. In approximately the same time frame, Xenophon provides a Wittgensteinian account of a go-and-look instance of what sophrosúne looked like in one ancient Greek context. We have a disturbing description of sophrosúne in action. It leaves a reader with quitea different picture of the meaning of these two key words from the staid, peaceful, deliberative contemporary interpretations, particularly in Continental philosophy, that attempt to make both phrónesis and sophrosúne the foundation for a praiseworthy ethics and politics. Continental philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer attended closely to Aristotelian phrónesis (not the Xenophonic variety), but were unable to put that learning into practice in their own ethical and political lives, making one wonder why followers of Heidegger and Gadamer continue to insist on ethical programs based in the Heideggerian and Gadamerian phronetic tradition, where Aristotle has supplanted Odysseus as the model most associated with phrón?sis and sophrosúne.

Tekhne, or techne, is derived from the Greek term technê, meaning art, craft, technique, or skill, and plays an important role in Ancient Greek philosophy (in, for instance, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle) where it is most often opposed to epistêmê, meaning knowledge. The legacy of the various Greek philosophical negotiations with, and distinctions between, technê and epistêmê leave a lasting mark on European thought and knowledge from the medieval period through to the early modern period and into modern philosophy from Emmanuel Kant onwards up to and including 20th-century phenomenology (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger) and its subsequent legacy, particularly in French philosophy. So, for instance, in Plato’s Protagoras, the myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus describes the latter’s theft of the technê of fire as a result of the former’s forgetfulness with regard to the bestowal of attributes to human beings. Here technê emerges as skill or technique but also as a more general founding moment of humankind’s technical and technological capacities. In The Republic Plato opposes the knowledge of reality and truth (of ideal forms) to the representational status of dramatic poetry (as a technê poietike or productive technique) and by extension to arts and literature in general. In this context the latter have a degraded status in relation to knowledge or truth, and this sets the stage for attempts that will be made by later philosophy to distance itself from aesthetic form or literary discourse. In Aristotle technê emerges within the distinction between art as productive technique and theoretical knowledge on the one hand (theoria) and action on the other (praxis). Aristotle’s distinctions have an influential afterlife in the medieval period and into the early modern, in particular in Emmanuel Kant’s definition of art as a skill or capacity for the production of things. The legacy of this long negotiation of Greek technê as art, productive technique, technical skill, or technology finds its way into 20th-century German phenomenology; in Edmund Husserl’s account of the rise of the scientific worldview and instrumental rationality in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1938) and in Martin Heidegger’s discourse on technological modernity, art, and the philosophical-poetic saying of being as it is developed from the 1930s onwards. The legacy of German phenomenological thinking relating to tekhne, understood as a fundamental dimension of both artistic and technological production, has a particularly strong afterlife in post–World War II French structuralism, poststructuralism, and contemporary philosophy. The influence of Husserl’s understanding of technicity can be traced directly in various ways into the work of, for instance, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Similarly, both Husserlian and Heideggerian discourse on tekhne find their way in the thinking of technology, ecotechnicity, and technics of contemporary philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy’s discourse on the technicity of art yields an affirmation of the irreducible plurality of aesthetic techniques and, in particular, a reorientation of possible ways of understanding the place of literature in the age of digital information technology.

Mathesis universalis is perhaps the ultimate formal system. The fact that the concept ties together truth, possibility, and formalism marks it as one of the most important concepts in Western modernity. “Mathesis” is Greek (μάθησις) for “learning” or “science.” The term is sometimes used to simply mean “mathematics”; the planet Mathesis, for instance, is named after the discipline of mathematics. It is philosophically significant when rendered as “mathesis universalis,” combining a Latinized version of the Greek μάθησις (learning) with the Latin universalis (universal). The most significant modern philosophers to develop the term were René Descartes (1596–1650) and Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), who used it to name a formal system that could support a project of scientia generalis (Descartes) or the ars combinatoria (Leibniz). In each case, mathesis universalis is a universal method. In this sense it does not constitute the content of the sciences but provides the formal system that undergirds no less than the acquisition and veracity of knowledge itself. Although mathesis universalis is only rarely mentioned in the literature of Descartes and Leibniz, philosophers including Edmund Husserl, Ernst Cassirer, and Martin Heidegger considered it one of the key traits of modernity, breaking with the era of substance (Rabouin) or resemblance (Foucault) to signal a new period defined by formalism and quantification. Thus, in the 20th century, the scant and often contradictory literature on mathesis actually produced by the great philosophers of the Enlightenment comes to take on an importance that far exceeds the term’s original level of systematic elaboration. The term mathesis universalis was rarely used by either Descartes or Leibniz, and the latter used many different terms to refer to the same concept. The complexity and subtlety of the term, combined with difficulties in establishing a rigorous systematic interpretation, has meant that mathesis universalis is often used vaguely or to encompass all scientific method. It is a difficult concept to account for, because although many philosophers and literary theorists will casually refer to it, often in its abbreviated form (Lacan references mathesis in opposition to poesis to contrast the procedures of the sciences and the arts, for instance), there is not a great deal of consistent theoretical elaboration of the term in literary and cultural theory. Although mathesis universalis is not simply an avatar of mathematics, it is difficult to establish exactly where maths ends and mathesis begins, so to speak. The distinction is murky in both Descartes’s and Leibniz’s work, and this ambiguity would become a key controversy surrounding the term in the 20th century, with Bertrand Russell arguing that the significance of symbolic logic to mathesis universalis prevented it from being a “premier” science. Along with Russell, Ernst Cassirer and Louis Couturat would contest the relation between symbolic logic and the symbolic algebra of mathesis universalis, providing the terms of the debate for 20th-century philosophical work on ontology. Mathesis universalis was also a source of debate and controversy in the 20th century because it provided a node from which to examine the status of scientific truth. It is the work of 20th-century philosophers that expanded the significance of the term, using it to exemplify aspects of Enlightenment thought that many philosophers wished to react against, namely the aspiration to a universal science and the privileging of formal systems as avenues to truth. In this respect, the term is associated with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and especially Michel Foucault, whose extensive work on the “classical episteme” provided a popular method of characterizing the development and enduring features of Enlightenment science. Although Foucault’s rendering of mathesis universalis as a “science of calculation” in The Order of Things (1970) is the most commonly used definition in literary and cultural studies, debates centering on Leibniz’s work in the early 20th century suggest that critics still took divergent approaches to the definition and significance of the term. It is Foucault who has popularized the contraction of the term to “mathesis.”

On the evening of May 11, 1960, Adolf Eichmann was seized in a suburb of Buenos Aires, and nine days later he was flown to Israel. The following April he stood trial in the District Court in Jerusalem – charged with “crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes during the whole period of the Nazi regime and especially during the period of the Second World War.” In December 1961, having been found guilty, he was sentenced to death – a sentence carried out in May 1962. These legal proceedings triggered intense American interest in the Holocaust – thanks in no small part to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).

With a new foreword by Dermot Moran ‘the work here presented seeks to found a new science – though, indeed, the whole course of philosophical development since Descartes has been preparing the way for it – a science covering a new field of experience, exclusively its own, that of "Transcendental Subjectivity"’ - Edmund Husserl, from the author’s preface to the English Edition Widely regarded as the principal founder of phenomenology, one of the most important movements in twentieth century philosophy, Edmund Husserl’s Ideas is one of his most important works and a classic of twentieth century thought. This Routledge Classics edition of the original translation by W.R. Boyce Gibson includes the introduction to the English edition written by Husserl himself in 1931. Husserl’s early thought conceived of phenomenology – the general study of what appears to conscious experience – in a relatively narrow way, mainly in relation to problems in logic and the theory of knowledge. The publication of Ideas in 1913 witnessed a significant and controversial widening of Husserl’s thought, changing the course of phenomenology decisively. Husserl argued that phenomenology was the study of the very nature of what it is to think, "the science of the essence of consciousness" itself. Husserl’s arguments ignited a heated debate regarding the nature of consciousness and experience that has endured throughout the twentieth and continues in the present day. No understanding of twentieth century philosophy is complete without some understanding of Husserl, and his work influenced some of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Escaping the Shadow

With a new foreword by Dermot Moran ‘the work here presented seeks to found a new science – though, indeed, whole course of philosophical development since Descartes has been preparing way for it – a science covering a new field of experience, exclusively its own, that of Transcendental Subjectivity’ - Edmund Husserl, from author’s preface to English Edition Widely regarded as principal founder of phenomenology, one of most important movements in twentieth century philosophy, Edmund Husserl’s Ideas is one of his most important works and a classic of twentieth century thought. This Routledge Classics edition of original translation by W.R. Boyce Gibson includes introduction to English edition written by Husserl himself in 1931. Husserl’s early thought conceived of phenomenology – general study of what appears to conscious experience – in a relatively narrow way, mainly in relation to problems in logic and theory of knowledge. The publication of Ideas in 1913 witnessed a significant and controversial widening of Husserl’s thought, changing course of phenomenology decisively. Husserl argued that phenomenology was study of very nature of what it is to think, the science of essence of itself. Husserl’s arguments ignited a heated debate regarding nature of consciousness and experience that has endured throughout twentieth and continues in present day. No understanding of twentieth century philosophy is complete without some understanding of Husserl, and his work influenced some of great philosophers of twentieth century, such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.